Hundreds of vaccination opponents packed an Albany courtroom Wednesday morning, eager to hear oral arguments in a lawsuit that could definitively overturn New York's religious exemptions to otherwise mandatory vaccines.

In June, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation requiring all school-age children to receive vaccinations, unless a medical condition prevents them from doing so. Cuomo intended the law to mitigate the spread of measles, rampant in the state's Orthodox Jewish communities, but attorneys Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Michael Sussman quickly requested a temporary restraining order.

Their lawsuit, filed in July on behalf of several dozen parents who say vaccinating goes against their faith, argues that setting vaccination as the bar for entry into New York schools violates the First Amendment right to religious freedom.

Many who stand to be affected by the new law gathered outside the State Supreme Court on Wednesday dressed in white. Organizers said their uniform harkened back to Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentinian women who protested the murder and disappearance of their children during their country's military dictatorship.

Court officer tells crowd there are well over a Thousand people here and crowd bursts into applause. pic.twitter.com/fLAdL4jDkb — Gwynne Hogan (@GwynneFitz) August 14, 2019

Attorney Michael Sussman, representing the plaintiffs, had strong metaphors too, telling the court New York State had "dropped what I consider a nuclear bomb on these families."

Some of Wednesday's demonstrators felt the new law effectively disappeared their children from the school system, and said they were considering homeschooling their children, even moving to a different state, if the religious exemption to vaccines isn't reinstated.

"[We're] hoping that our kids are granted the right to go back to school. Our children have been kicked out," said Long Island resident Amy McBride, 41, mother of four kids, three of whom are school-aged. "We've all been meeting, trying to look at curriculums, understand how to make it work, what the regulations are, understanding what it takes to actually do that...Our beliefs are steadfast and sincere and true and we're not going to cave."

During oral arguments, attorney Sussman—who's been involved in litigation in a number of vaccine-related cases in Rockland County—argued that specific lawmakers were deliberately targeting devout religious groups in removing the exemption, though the vast majority of major religions have no prohibitions on vaccinating.

"The active hostility towards religion...was a pervasive theme and it needn't have been," Sussman said. "[These children] are going to have nowhere to go to school...They have no idea what they are going to do with these children."

But Helena Lynch, an attorney for New York State, disputed Sussman's claims, saying legislators weren't hostile; rather, they were "skeptical" about whether people were expressing religious beliefs or personal ones.

As measles spread throughout New York state this spring, so too did misinformation about vaccines that's often informed parents' choice not to vaccinate. The overwhelming body of scientific research, data on tens of thousands of children over decades, has found vaccination to be safe and effective.

One person's right to religious freedom runs out, Lynch emphasized, when it infringes upon another's well-being, as courts have repeatedly affirmed.

"The actual legislative record is so clear that the motivation was public health," she said. "The right to religious expression does not encompass the right to place others in danger."

Crowd now chanting freedom and “lets go to school” pic.twitter.com/cqNu1wZ1KF — Gwynne Hogan (@GwynneFitz) August 14, 2019

Judge Hartman didn't rule on whether or not to grant a preliminary injunction in their case, which could put a stay on the state law and allow some 26,000 unvaccinated children to return to school come September. It wasn't immediately clear when she would make her decision.



