The state of Texas is a firm friend of religious liberty, as it has demonstrated over and over again on issues ranging from preserving Native-American religious practices to protecting the ability of Catholic schools to choose their religion teachers without government interference, to ensuring the ability to worship during the time of pandemic. Few states have as proud a record.
But Texas's otherwise stellar religious-liberty record suffers from one black mark: prisons. Over the years, our firm, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has been opposed to Texas in prisoner religious-liberty cases involving access to communion for a Greek Orthodox prisoner, access to kosher food for observant Jewish prisoners, and, most recently, access to clergy for prisoners condemned to death.
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