New York’s Amish do not want a fight. They want a one-room schoolhouse on their own land, a horse, a Bible, and the right to raise their children without Albany’s syringe in the door. The state answered with $2,000 fines, a Cuomo-era decree, and a health department that treats a peaceable church like a public nuisance. So the plain people are saying the quiet part out loud. If the Supreme Court will not protect them, they will leave.
That is not a metaphor. Attorneys for the families in Miller v. McDonald told the New York Post the community of roughly 25,000 — the fifth-largest Amish population in the country — will pack up for Pennsylvania if they lose.
Pennsylvania already holds about 95,000 of them. New York can keep the bureaucrats.
“Have we gotten to a place where we aren’t going to make room for the Amish anymore?” asked Hiram Sasser, one of the lawyers. “When you think of Americana — apple pie, fireworks — the Amish are on that list. They’re part of the American fabric. They’re a good litmus test of our religious liberty and our tolerance.”
The test is not going well.
Cuomo Took the Exemption. The Fines Did the Rest.
In 2019, after a measles outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed away New York’s religious exemption to school immunization rules. California had already done it. Maine and Connecticut later joined the club. West Virginia never offered one. Medical exemptions stayed. Faith did not.
The law does not stop at public school. It hits private and parochial classrooms too, including Amish schools that take no tax money, sit on private land, and teach only Amish children. New York still demands 24 to 27 shots for K-12 attendance. The Amish generally refuse injectables. Their religion treats trust in the shot as a rival to trust in God.
Ezra Wengerd of Canajoharie, 55, an Old Order father and an elected representative of the state’s Amish schools, put it in a handwritten letter.
“We, as a peace loving religious group, are sincerely sorry that we are causing the state a prob. We are indeed grateful to the state of NY for the many privileges freedoms and protections they have blessed us with, for many years. Our Almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in Him. Which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines. We are also commanded to not be conformed to this world.”
The state was not interested in the apology. It started slapping $2,000 penalties on noncompliant schools around 2022. Three named in the suit — Shady Lane in Clymer, Pleasant View in Heuvelton, and Dygert Road near Canajoharie — have already been hit for $118,000 combined. Lawyers say every Amish school in New York sits in the same trap. The Health Department would not tell the Post how many others have been fined. Aaron Siri, who also represents the families, noted the only realistic way to collect that kind of money is to take the land.
Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.
The Second Circuit Doubled Down After the High Court Said Look Again
The Amish have been in federal court since 2024. They lost at the district level. The New York-based Second Circuit — majority Democrat-appointed — sided with the state. Last year the Supreme Court vacated that ruling and sent it back for another look in light of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the 2025 decision that backed parents who objected on religious grounds to a school district’s LGBT curriculum, as The Christian Post reported when the remand landed.
The Second Circuit “reconsidered.” On June 30, 2026, it issued the same answer. Neutral law. Generally applicable. Rational basis. The vaccine rule, the panel said, does not tell children what to believe, so Mahmoud does not save the Amish. The court treated a needle in a child’s arm as less serious than a storybook in a classroom.
That is the legal magic trick. Keep a medical exemption. Kill the religious one. Call the statute neutral. Pretend Wisconsin v. Yoder — the 1972 case that stopped Wisconsin from forcing Amish teenagers into high school — has nothing to say when the same people ask to keep their own little schools free of a mandate that violates their creed.
Siri has said the families will petition the Supreme Court again next month. They do not want to be there. Amish culture generally forbids both lawsuits and injectables. “They’ve been left with no choice,” he told the Post.
The Children Albany Wants to “Protect”
Here is the part the Department of Health would rather not put on a press release. Sworn filings in the case describe 168 unvaccinated children across 26 families at the three targeted schools. None had a health problem that arose after birth.
Expert evidence compared that group with expected rates in a random sample of 168 American children and found the usual load of chronic illness missing — the allergies, ADHD, asthma, and autism that now pass for normal in vaccinated cohorts.
Daniel Horowitz at The Blaze asked the obvious question. Why treat a living, unvaccinated population as a problem to be fined out of existence instead of evidence worth studying? New York’s answer is a slogan. A spokeswoman told the Post the department’s job is to “protect public health,” “enforce the law fairly and equitably,” and follow requirements “based in science.”
Fairly. Equitably. Against people who build their own schools and ask nothing from the treasury except to be left alone.
Wayne State law professor Christopher Lund told the Post the Amish are sympathetic plaintiffs, but the state is “thinking more widely.” That is the whole philosophy in one phrase. The individual conscience is always the rounding error.
The herd is the point. The Second Circuit has spent years batting down religious objectors to COVID shots. Vaccine cases make the justices nervous. Medical authorities still get the benefit of the doubt they squandered during the last panic.
The Trump administration is at least saying the quiet counterpoint. An HHS spokesman told the Post that the president’s executive order reaffirmed parental choice and religious freedom on childhood vaccination, and that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the department will keep working to protect parents who make health decisions “in accordance with their deeply held beliefs.”
A Litmus Test New York Is Failing
Other states have found workarounds when Amish life collided with modern rules — photo IDs, reflective tape on buggies, building codes. New York chose confiscatory fines on churches that look like Little House on the Prairie.
If the high court shrugs, the buggies roll west. Pennsylvania will take them. New York will keep its schedule of 27 shots, its empty desks, and the proud claim that no child’s faith is allowed to interfere with the state’s idea of safety. The Amish will still be the Amish. Albany will still be Albany. Only one of those two has ever been good at leaving people alone.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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