Source: https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/decision/torcaso-v-watkins-clerk/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 18:23:14+00:00

Document:
APPEAL FROM THE COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND.Leo Pfeffer and Lawrence Speiser argued the cause for appellant. With them on the briefs were Joseph A. Sickles, Carlton R. Sickles, Bruce N. Goldberg, Rowland Watts and George Kaufmann.
Briefs of amici curiae, urging reversal, were filed by Herbert A. Wolff and Leo Rosen for the American Ethical Union, and by Herbert B. Ehrmann, Lawrence Peirez, Isaac G. McNatt, Abraham Blumberg, Arnold Forster, Paul Hartman, Theodore Leskes, Edwin J. Lukas and Sol Rabkin for the American Jewish Committee et al.
*489 MR. JUSTICE BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.
The appellant Torcaso was appointed to the office of Notary Public by the Governor of Maryland but was refused a commission to serve because he would not declare his belief in God. He then brought this action in a Maryland Circuit Court to compel issuance of his commission, charging that the State’s requirement that he declare this belief violated “the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States . . . .” The Circuit Court rejected these federal constitutional contentions, and the highest court of the State, the Court of Appeals, affirmed, holding that the state constitutional provision is self-executing and requires declaration of belief in God as a qualification for office without need for implementing legislation. The case is therefore properly here on appeal under 28 U. S. C. § 1257 (2).
There is, and can be, no dispute about the purpose or effect of the Maryland Declaration of Rights requirement before us—it sets up a religious test which was designed to *490 and, if valid, does bar every person who refuses to declare a belief in God from holding a public “office of profit or trust” in Maryland. The power and authority of the State of Maryland thus is put on the side of one particular sort of believers—those who are willing to say they believe in “the existence of God.” It is true that there is much historical precedent for such laws. Indeed, it was largely to escape religious test oaths and declarations that a great many of the early colonists left Europe and came here hoping to worship in their own way. It soon developed, however, that many of those who had fled to escape religious test oaths turned out to be perfectly willing, when they had the power to do so, to force dissenters from their faith to take test oaths in conformity with that faith. This brought on a host of laws in the new Colonies imposing burdens and disabilities of various kinds upon varied beliefs depending largely upon what group happened to be politically strong enough to legislate in favor of its own beliefs. The effect of all this was the formal or practical “establishment” of particular religious faiths in most of the Colonies, with consequent burdens imposed on the free exercise of the faiths of nonfavored believers.
When our Constitution was adopted, the desire to put the people “securely beyond the reach” of religious test oaths brought about the inclusion in Article VI of that document of a provision that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Article VI supports the accuracy of our observation in Girouard v. United States, 328 U. S. 61, 69, that “[t]he test oath is abhorrent to our tradition.” Not satisfied, however, with Article VI and other guarantees in the original Constitution, the First Congress proposed and the States very shortly thereafter *492 adopted our Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment. That Amendment broke new constitutional ground in the protection it sought to afford to freedom of religion, speech, press, petition and assembly. Since prior cases in this Court have thoroughly explored and documented the history behind the First Amendment, the reasons for it, and the scope of the religious freedom it protects, we need not cover that ground again. What was said in our prior cases we think controls our decision here.
The Maryland Court of Appeals thought, and it is argued here, that this Court’s later holding and opinion in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, had in part repudiated the statement in the Everson opinion quoted above and previously reaffirmed in McCollum. But the Court’s opinion in Zorach specifically stated: “We follow the McCollum case.” 343 U. S., at 315. Nothing decided or written in Zorach lends support to the idea that the Court there intended to open up the way for government, state or federal, to restore the historically and constitutionally discredited policy of probing religious beliefs by test oaths or limiting public offices to persons who have, or perhaps more properly profess to have, a belief in some particular kind of religious concept.
*495 We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person “to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.” Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.
This Maryland religious test for public office unconstitutionally invades the appellant’s freedom of belief and religion and therefore cannot be enforced against him.
 Appellant also claimed that the State’s test oath requirement violates the provision of Art. VI of the Federal Constitution that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Because we are reversing the judgment on other grounds, we find it unnecessary to consider appellant’s contention that this provision applies to state as well as federal offices.
 223 Md. 49, 162 A. 2d 438. Appellant’s alternative contention that this test violates the Maryland Constitution also was rejected by the state courts.
 See, e. g., I Stokes, Church and State in the United States, 358-446. See also cases cited, note 7, infra.
Of course this was long before Madison’s great Memorial and Remonstrance and the enactment of the famous Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty, discussed in our opinion in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 11-13.
 See, e. g., the opinions of the Court and also the concurring and dissenting opinions in Reynolds v. United States, 98 U. S. 145; Davis v. Beason, 133 U. S. 333; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296; West Virginia State Bd. of Education v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624; Fowler v. Rhode Island, 345 U. S. 67; Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1; Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U. S. 203; McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U. S. 420.
“In short, test-laws are utterly ineffectual: they are no security at all; because men of loose principles will, by an external compliance, evade them. If they exclude any persons, it will be honest men, men of principle, who will rather suffer an injury, than act contrary to the dictates of their consciences. . . .” Quoted in Ford, Essays on the Constitution of the United States, 170. See also 4 Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 193.
And another delegate pointed out that Article VI “leaves religion on the solid foundation of its own inherent validity, without any connection with temporal authority; and no kind of oppression can take place.” 4 Elliot, op. cit., supra, at 194, 200.
 Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others. See Washington Ethical Society v. District of Columbia, 101 U. S. App. D. C. 371, 249 F. 2d 127; Fellowship of Humanity v. County of Alameda, 153 Cal. App. 2d 673, 315 P. 2d 394; II Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences 293; 4 Encyclopaedia Britannica (1957 ed.) 325-327; 21 id., at 797; Archer, Faiths Men Live By (2d ed. revised by Purinton), 120-138, 254-313; 1961 World Almanac 695, 712; Year Book of American Churches for 1961, at 29, 47.
 344 U. S., at 191-192, quoting from United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U. S. 75, 100.

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