Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1088_dbfi.pdf
Page Number: 15.0

Cite as:  596 U. S. ____ (2022) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

the community from an otherwise generally available pub-
lic benefit because of their religious exercise.* 

III 
The First Circuit attempted to distinguish our precedent
by recharacterizing the nature of Maine’s tuition assistance 
program  in  two  ways,  both  of  which  Maine  echoes  before 
this Court.  First, the panel defined the benefit at issue as
the “rough equivalent of [a Maine] public school education,” 
an education that cannot include sectarian instruction.  979 
F. 3d, at 44; see also Brief for Respondent 22.  Second, the 
panel defined the nature of the exclusion as one based not 
on a school’s religious “status,” as in Trinity Lutheran and 
Espinoza, but on religious “uses” of public funds.  979 F. 3d, 
at 38–40; see also Brief for Respondent 35.  Neither of these 
formal  distinctions  suffices  to  distinguish  this  case  from 
Trinity Lutheran or Espinoza, or to affect the application of 
the free exercise principles outlined above. 

A 
The  First  Circuit  held  that  the  “nonsectarian”  require-
ment was constitutional because the benefit was properly
viewed not as tuition assistance payments to be used at ap-
proved  private  schools,  but  instead  as  funding  for  the
“rough equivalent of the public school education that Maine 
may permissibly require to be secular.”  979 F. 3d, at 44.  As 
Maine  puts  it,  “[t]he  public  benefit  Maine  is  offering  is  a 
free public education.”  Brief for Respondent 1–2.

To start with, the statute does not say anything like that.
It says that an SAU without a secondary school of its own 

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*Both dissents articulate a number of other reasons not to extend the 
tuition assistance program to BCS and Temple Academy, based on the 
schools’  particular  policies  and  practices.  Post,  at  15–16  (opinion  of 
BREYER, J.); post, at 4 (opinion of SOTOMAYOR, J.).  Maine rightly does not
attempt to defend its law on such grounds, however, because the law rig-
idly excludes any and all sectarian schools regardless of particular char-
acteristics.  See supra, at 3.