declared a misdemeanor. The District Court of The United States
for Oregon enjoined the enforcement of the statute and the Supreme Court
unanimously sustained its action,[42] holding that the measure
unreasonably interfered with the liberty of parents and guardians to
direct the upbringing and education of children under their control--a
liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. While the First Amendment
was not mentioned in the Court's opinion, the subsequent absorption of
its religious clauses into the Fourteenth Amendment seems to make the
case relevant to the question of their proper interpretation.

FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION: FEDERAL RESTRAINTS

Religious belief cannot be pleaded as a justification for an overt act
made criminal by the law of the land. "Laws are made for the government
of action, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief
and opinions, they may with practices."[43] To permit a man to excuse
conduct in violation of law on the ground of religious belief "would be
to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law
of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto
himself."[44] It does not follow that "because no mode of worship can be
established or religious tenets enforced in this country, therefore any
tenets, however destructive of society, may be held and advocated, if
asserted, to be a part of the religious doctrine of those advocating and
practicing them * * * Whilst legislation for the establishment of a
religion is forbidden, and its free exercise permitted, it does not
follow that everything which may be so-called can be tolerated. Crime is
not the less odious because sanctioned by what any particular sect may
designate as religion."[45] Accordingly acts of Congress directed
against either the practice of the advocacy of polygamy by members of a
religious sect which sanctioned the practice, were held valid.[46] But
when, in the Ballard Case,[47] decided in 1944, the promoters of a
religious sect, whose founder had at different times identified himself
as Saint Germain, Jesus, George Washington, and Godfre Ray King, were
convicted of using the mails to defraud by obtaining money on the
strength of having supernaturally healed hundreds of persons, they found
the Court in a softened frame of mind. Although the trial judge,
carefully discriminating between the question of the truth of
defendants' pretensions and that of their good