Religious Freedom and Solar Energy: A Combination You Probably Weren’t Expecting To Encounter

Without question, the protections we Americans enjoy under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution have been used in some strange ways over the years.  Most recently, we’ve seen the free exercise of religion used to defend certain people’s right to deny service to the LGBT community; I don’t think too many people saw that one coming, and even fewer thought it would survive the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.

Here’s a novel twist:  The Unitarian Universalists are claiming that their right to install solar PV on the roof of their church is protected under this principle, insofar as they “believe that their religion necessarily involves taking action…to confine and mitigate mankind’s role in causing and exacerbating global warming.”

Gotta like it.