On the whole, the decisions of the last 12 or 15 years have been relatively favorable to religious interests. But notice those important qualifiers “on the whole” and “relatively.”
Some of the justices approach religion very much as they might a growling dog: turn your back on it and it may bite. When the court ruled a year ago against student-led prayer at high school football games, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said the decision “bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.” By no means have we seen the end of that.
It is against this background that the Supreme Court’s latest excursions into the church-state area deserve attention — not because they are of transcendent importance in themselves but for the light they shed on the current state of questions that really are important.
In early June, the court held 6-3 that public schools must permit students to use their facilities for after-school activities of a religious nature on the same basis that they allow their use for non-religious purposes. Writing for the chief justice and Justices O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy and Breyer, Justice Thomas said this would “ensure neutrality, not threaten it.”
The case, Good News Club vs. Milford Central School, originated in upstate New York. It involved an evangelical children’s organization called the Good News Club that had sought permission to use the local school premises for after-class sessions just as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and 4-H Club already did. The school authorities said no, citing separation of church and state.
Predictably, three members of the Supreme Court — Justices Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg — saw no problem with that. Fortunately, the other six did. They viewed it, as most people probably would, as an unjustifiable discrimination against religion.
But wouldn’t the fact that the Good News Club was using public facilities for activities like reading bible stories, singing religious songs and prayer lead impressionable children to suppose (oh, horror!) that the state looked with favor on what the Good News Club was doing? Justice Thomas responded in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t vein. “We cannot say the danger that children will misperceive the endorsement of religion is any greater than the danger that they would perceive a hostility if the club were excluded,” he remarked.
Lest religious people get big ideas from all this, however, the Supreme Court lurched in the opposite direction a week later.
The court refused without comment to consider an appeal from lower court rulings that supported a Newark, N.J., first-grade teacher who in 1996 refused to let young Zachary Hood read his classmates the story of Jacob and Esau from his beginner’s bible during a reading class. For Zachary to do that, the teacher told his mother, “might influence other students” (oh, horror!). The principal called what Zachary proposed to do “the equivalent of praying” (horror again!).
As teacher and parents know, children are at risk of catching a lot of things in a first-grade classroom — measles, chicken pox, other childhood ills. As long as our zealous watchdogs of the Constitution are on the job, though, one thing you can be sure the kids won’t catch is religion. Thank you, Newark public schools. Thank you, Supreme Court.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
