At this point, we all know claims of religious freedom can work like magic words. Say “religious freedom,” and you can demand tax money for your school or social service program even if you proselytize and discriminate, and you can ignore inconvenient employment laws.

Just say that your religion demands it, and even public health and safety is a casualty. The U.S. Supreme Court went out of its way during the COVID-19 pandemic to slap down state-imposed capacity limits for houses of worship, despite evidence that church services had become superspreader events. All in the name of religious liberty.

The question is: Just how far will this new paradigm of indulging religion and its followers go? Will it cover any and all situations in which religious adherents are claiming the right to put other people in physical jeopardy? What about when religious leaders say one thing and adherents claim another? Will the courts make every claimed religious belief, no matter how personal and nontheologically based, a law unto itself?

This question is not academic. A group of anti-vaxx parents in Connecticut is claiming a religious right to keep from vaccinating their children, even though none of their various faiths is opposed to vaccinations.

We the Patriots USA, Inc. vs. Connecticut Office of Early Childhood Development, a federal suit filed in April, includes three mothers—one Catholic, one Muslim, and one Greek Orthodox—who object to a new law in Connecticut repealing the state’s religious exemptions for vaccinations for children to attend public or private school.

Each parent claims she has a religious right to reject vaccinations for her children and a corollary right to have her children attend public and private school unvaccinated.

Having children vaccinated not only protects them against deadly diseases; it protects other children who for medical reasons are not able to be vaccinated. The clear public-safety imperative surrounding vaccinations has been a cornerstone of legal precedents dating back to 1905 when, in the case of Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law granting cities the power to mandate that their residents be vaccinated. In 1922, the high court followed that up with a case upholding an ordinance in San Antonio, Texas, that required children in public and private schools to provide proof of vaccination against smallpox before being allowed to attend.

The parents in the Connecticut challenge, filed three days after the law repealing religious exemptions was passed, are using well-trod excuses against the vaccination requirement.

The parents say that any vaccine utilizing fetal-derived cell lines for testing or production is “morally wrong” and is the effective equivalent of participating in murder. The Muslim parent asserts that some vaccines utilize porcine gelatine as a stabilizer, which violates Islamic tenets against consuming pork. The Catholic mother claims being vegan is part of her “personal religious beliefs” and that injections containing animal cells are morally wrong. And one parent claims her son’s speech and learning disorder was caused by the MMR vaccine and that harming children is morally wrong.

The truth about human fetal cells and the current vaccines shows how remote this concern should be. According to a fact-checked piece on verywellhealth.com, none of the current vaccines for COVID-19 contains human fetal cells. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines used human fetal cell lines in the development phase to demonstrate that the vaccine would be effective. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine used fetal cell lines in the development and production process. In all cases, the cells used were initially derived from fetuses aborted in the 1960s and 1970s.

These same cell lines have been used to make other vaccines as well as vast numbers of today’s medical interventions, including treatments for cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure. In a piece by Katarina Carranco of the anti-choice Population Research Institute, she made the apt point that “If the use of the currently available COVID vaccines is illicit because of their association with these cell lines, then the same use of these cells in the production of almost all of today’s medications makes their use equally illicit and we must therefore refuse them” (emphasis in original).

“This would put the lives of countless people at immediate risk, and create an even bigger moral dilemma,” Carranco concluded.

As to the pork gelatine claim, COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna contain no animal derivatives; as with the point about the fetal tissue cell lines, rejecting medicine with any connection to pigs or other animals would put much of modern medical science out of reach.

And we know, vaccines don’t cause learning disabilities or autism. That falsehood has been well slayed by science.

So, all these claims fail. Either their science is faulty, or the parents are likely hypocrites who ignore religious objections in other circumstances.

I don’t usually quote the Vatican approvingly, but both the Vatican and its evil twin, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, say that getting vaccinated is not only acceptable, it is an act of charity and a duty toward others.

Here’s what the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said in December about COVID-19 vaccines:

The morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health but also on the duty to pursue the common good. In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed.

A December statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that getting vaccinated “ought to be understood as an act of charity toward the other members of our community.”

Similarly in Islam, barrister Sadakat Kadri wrote in The Guardian, “As sharia scholars have said many times, vaccination isn’t merely a permissible choice for Muslims. Because it helps to protect others, it is what they call a fard kifaya—a collective obligation.”

Kadri noted that COVID-19 vaccines have been approved by the British Islamic Medical Association, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia.

A statement issued in January by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of the United States urged congregants to consult their personal doctor for advice on whether to be vaccinated. “We trust that whatever course of action you and your doctor decide upon will also benefit the rest of the community.” Basically, follow the science.

But the fact that all major religions, including the ones listed above, approve of vaccinations may not be the last word. The mothers in the lawsuit are claiming objections based on “sincerely held religious beliefs,” regardless of what their faith actually tells them.

There are those magic words again.

In the infamous Supreme Court decision Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, the court allowed Hobby Lobby to ignore the Obamacare requirement that contraceptives be covered in employee health insurance. The reason was Hobby Lobby’s sincerely held religious beliefs that some of the contraceptives were abortifacients. It didn’t matter that they weren’t. Because science didn’t matter, only beliefs did.

We may be at a point where simply claiming sincerely held religious beliefs makes you a law unto yourself. Your beliefs can put other people, including school children, at deadly risk. Your beliefs can get the science wrong. Your beliefs can be at loggerheads with your faith leaders. Your beliefs can be applied inconsistently and pop in and out depending on the circumstances. And yet, you still might win.

It will be a terrible result for society, but it’s a future that seems more likely than not.