which the District Court then denied. On May 29, 2015, United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Judge James B. Loken, joined by Judge Michael Joseph Melloy, affirmed the District Court, over the partial dissent of Judge Raymond Gruender. On August 11, 2015, a rehearing en banc was denied by an equally divided circuit, with Judges Gruender, William J. Riley, Lavenski Smith, Steven Colloton, and Bobby Shepherd voting to review. On January 15, 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States granted the Church's petition for a writ of certiorari, certifying the question of, "Whether the exclusion of churches from an otherwise neutral and secular aid program violates the Free Exercise Clause and the Equal Protection Clause when the state has no valid Establishment Clause concern." Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the Court twelve days before the case was argued in April 2017. Six days before oral argument, Eric Greitens, Missouri’s new Republican Governor, issued a press release announcing that the DNR had been told to allow religious organizations to compete for the tire scrap grants. One day before oral argument, Josh Hawley, Missouri's new Republican Attorney General, recused himself and announced that the state's former Solicitor General would instead argue the case for the state. On April 19, 2017, one hour of oral arguments were heard, where an attorney from the Alliance Defending Freedom appeared for the church and the former Missouri Solicitor General appeared for that state. Opinion of the Court On June 26, 2017, the last day of the term, the Supreme Court delivered judgment in favor of the church, with seven justices voting to reverse the court below. Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion joined fully by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan, and partially by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote that the state violated the First Amendment by denying a public benefit to an otherwise eligible recipient solely on account of its religious status, calling it "odious to our Constitution" to exclude the church from the grant program, even though the consequences are only "a few extra scraped knees." The Court read , in which a plurality of Justices had found that ministers could not be disqualified from becoming delegates to a state constitutional convention, as holding that special disabilities imposed due to religious status are subject to strict scrutiny. The Court then found that Missouri's treatment of the