Amish schools owe New York $118,000. Measles is spreading upstate.

In Corinth, much of the meat in the market had been offered to an idol before it was sold. Some Christians there told Paul an idol is nothing, so a steak is just a steak. Paul agreed with them on the facts. But other believers in that church had walked out of those same temples, and eating the meat felt to them like walking back in. So Paul told the confident ones that being right was where the question started.

New York is living its own version of that argument, and each side's press has covered half of it. In 2022 the state fined three Amish schoolhouses a combined $118,000 for enrolling unvaccinated children, three years after it ended religious exemptions. On September 29, Amish parents asked the Supreme Court to hear their case, and the justices have until November 2 to decide. Their lawyer, Hiram Sasser, says New York is "making the choice that they no longer welcome the Amish."

Then on October 5, Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a statewide measles emergency. There have been 108 cases this year, 92 since mid-July, in what her office calls "under-immunized, rural communities." Local health departments have given more than 1,000 vaccine doses. The outbreak reports don't say the patients are Amish. Still, Allegany County is looking at a possible link to horse auctions. Yates County, which has a large Amish community, has the state's lowest vaccination rate. Next door in Pennsylvania, measles has killed five people this year, two of them unvaccinated Amish babies.

The same letter that guards a fragile conscience asks whoever holds a right to set it down for someone else.

In Paul's sense, the weak are people like the Amish man at the Fort Plain produce auction who said "we'll go to jail" before taking the vaccines. Pushing such a brother to act against his conscience, Paul says, is a sin "against Christ". That is a hard word for a state that has reached for fines, whatever its outreach. In Ohio's 2014 outbreak, officials who worked closely with the Amish found them "surprisingly willing" to get vaccinated and stay home when sick. But Paul doesn't stop at conscience. Two chapters later he widens the rule to every neighbor:

1 Corinthians 10:24Let no one seek his own, but each one his neighbor's good.

That neighbor has a face in Fort Plain, where a local business owner worries the disease will reach the "English," the Amish word for everyone else. The Amish are divided much as Corinth was; a woman at a Fort Plain store said of vaccines, "We don't mind." Paul puts the same question to both sides, since both hold something they could set down.

The Supreme Court will decide who has the right. Whoever wins will still be holding it, and Paul's question will be waiting for them: who gets hurt if you use it?