Cite as: 508 U. S. 520 (1993)
Opinion of Souter, J.
clusion that, whatever Smith's virtues, they do not include a comfortable fit with settled law.
B
The Smith rule, in my view, may be reexamined consistently with principles of stare decisis. To begin with, the Smith rule was not subject to "full-dress argument" prior to its announcement. Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643, 676-677 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting). The State of Oregon in Smith contended that its refusal to exempt religious peyote use survived the strict scrutiny required by "settled free exercise principles," inasmuch as the State had "a compelling interest in regulating" the practice of peyote use and could not "accommodate the religious practice without compromishas placed a substantial burden on the observation of a central religious belief or practice and, if so, whether a compelling governmental interest justifies the burden") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Assn., 485 U. S. 439, 450 (1988) ("[T]his Court has repeatedly held that indirect coercion or penalties on the free exercise of religion, not just outright prohibitions, are subject to [the] scrutiny" employed in Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U. S. 398 (1963); see also Braunfeld v. Brown, 366 U. S. 599, 606-607 (1961) (plurality opinion). Among the cases in which we have purported to apply strict scrutiny, we have required free-exercise exemptions more often than we have denied them. Compare Frazee v. Illinois Dept. of Employment Security, 489 U. S. 829 (1989); Hobbie v. Unemployment Appeals Comm'n of Fla., 480 U. S. 136 (1987); Thomas v. Review Bd. of Indiana Employment Security Div., 450 U. S. 707 (1981); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205 (1972); Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296 (1940), with Hernandez v. Commissioner, 490 U. S. 680 (1989); Bob Jones Univ. v. United States, 461 U. S. 574 (1983); United States v. Lee, 455 U. S. 252 (1982). And of the three cases in which we found that denial of an exemption survived strict scrutiny (all tax cases), one involved the government's "fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education," Bob Jones University, supra, at 604; in a second the Court "doubt[ed] whether the alleged burden . . . [was] a substantial one," Hernandez, supra, at 699; and the Court seemed to be of the same view in the third, see Lee, supra, at 261, n. 12. These cases, I think, provide slim grounds for concluding that the Court has not been true to its word.
571
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