Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0515_0819_ZD.html
Timestamp: 2013-05-23 21:34:56
Document Index: 228722575

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1062', '§ 1069', '§ 1132', '§ 1132', '§ 1213', '§ 3306', '§ 776', '§ 3027', '§ 5001', '§ 9858']

No. 94-329 Argued: March 1, 1995 --- Decided: JUSTICE SOUTER, with whom JUSTICE STEVENS, JUSTICE GINSBURG and JUSTICE BREYER join, dissenting.
Using public funds for the direct subsidization of preaching the word is categorically forbidden under the Establishment Clause, and if the Clause was meant to accomplish nothing else, it was meant to bar this use of public money. Evidence on the subject antedates even the Bill of Rights itself, as may be seen in the writings of Madison, whose authority on questions about the meaning of the Establishment Clause is well settled, e.g., Committee for Public Ed. & Religious Liberty v. Nyquist, 413 U.S. 756, 770, n. 28 (1973); Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, 330 U.S. 1, 13 (1947). Four years before the First Congress proposed the First Amendment, Madison gave his opinion on the legitimacy of using public funds for religious purposes, in the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which played the central role in ensuring the defeat of the Virginia tax assessment bill in 1786 and framed the debate upon which the Religion Clauses stand: Who does not see that . . . the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?
Jefferson, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, reprinted in 5 The Founder's Constitution 84-85 (P. Kurland & R. Lerner eds. 1987), and its text provided "[t]hat no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever. . . . ," ibid. See generally Everson, supra, at 13. We have
1If the Court's suggestion is that this feature of the funding program brings this case into line with Witters, Mueller, and Zobrest (discussed supra at ___), the Court has misread those cases, which turned on the fact that the choice to benefit religion was made by a nonreligious third party standing between the government and a religious institution. See Witters, 474 U.S. at 487; see also Mueller, 463 U.S. at 399-400; Zobrest, 509 U.S. at ___-___. Here, there is no third party standing between the government and the ultimate religious beneficiary to break the circuit by its independent discretion to put state money to religious use. The printer, of course, has no option to take the money and use it to print a secular journal instead of Wide Awake. It only gets the money because of its contract to print a message of religious evangelism at the direction of Wide Awake, and it will receive payment only for doing precisely that. The formalism of distinguishing between payment to Wide Awake so it can pay an approved bill and payment of the approved bill itself cannot be the basis of a decision of Constitutional law. If this indeed were a critical distinction, the Constitution would permit a State to pay all the bills of any religious institution; [n10] in fact, despite the Court's purported adherence to the "no direct funding" principle, the State could simply hand out credit cards to religious institutions and honor the monthly statements (so long as someone could devise an evenhanded umbrella to cover the whole scheme). Witters and the other cases cannot be distinguished out of existence this way.
2It is more probable, however, that the Court's reference to the printer goes to a different attempt to justify the payment. On this purported justification, the payment to the printer is significant only as the last step in an argument resting on the assumption that a public university may give a religious group the use of any of its equipment or facilities so long as secular groups are likewise eligible. The Court starts with the cases of Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U.S. 263 (1981), Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, 496 U.S. 226 (1990), and Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., 508 U.S. ___ (1993), in which religious groups were held to be entitled to access for speaking in government buildings open generally for that purpose. The Court reasons that the availability of a forum has economic value (the government built and maintained the building, while the speakers saved the rent for a hall); and that economically there is no difference between the University's provision of the value of the room and the value, say, of the University's printing equipment; and that therefore the University must be able to provide the use of the latter. Since it may do that, the argument goes, it would be unduly formalistic to draw the line at paying for an outside printer, who simply does what the magazine's publishers could have done with the University's own printing equipment. Ante at ___.
3It must, indeed, be a recognition of just this point that leads the Court to take a third tack, not in coming up with yet a third attempt at justification within the rules of existing case law, but in recasting the scope of the Establishment Clause in ways that make further affirmative justification unnecessary. JUSTICE O'CONNOR makes a comprehensive analysis of the manner in which the activity fee is assessed and distributed. She concludes that the funding differs so sharply from religious funding out of governmental treasuries generally that it falls outside Establishment Clause's purview in the absence of a message of religious endorsement (which she finds not to be present). Ante at ___ (O'CONNOR, J., concurring). The opinion of the Court concludes more expansively that the activity fee is not a tax, and then proceeds to find the aid permissible on the legal assumption that the bar against direct aid applies only to aid derived from tax revenue. I have already indicated why it is fanciful to treat the fee as anything but a tax, supra at ___, and n. 3; see also ante at ___ (noting mandatory nature of the fee), and will not repeat the point again. The novelty of the assumption that the direct aid bar only extends to aid derived from taxation, however, requires some response.
6. In Zobrest, a deaf student sought to have an interpreter, provided under a state Act aiding individuals with disabilities, accompany him to a Roman Catholic high school. In Witters, a blind student sought to use aid, provided under a state program for assistance to handicapped persons, to attend a private Christian college. In Mueller, parents sought to take a tax deduction, available for parents of both public and nonpublic schoolchildren, for certain expenses incurred in connection with providing education for their children in private religious schools. 7. Walz v. Tax Comm'n of New York City, 397 U.S. 664 (1970), is yet another example of a case in which the Court treated the general availability of a government benefit as a significant condition defining compliance with the Establishment Clause, but did not deem that condition sufficient. In upholding state property tax exemptions given to religious organizations in Walz, we noted that the law at issue was applicable to "a broad class of property owned by nonprofit [and] quasi-public corporations," id. at 673, but did not rest on that factor alone. Critical to our decision was the central principle that direct funding of religious activities is prohibited under the Establishment Clause.
8. Although the main opinion in Tilton was a plurality, the entire Court was unanimous on this point. See 403 U.S. at 682-684 (plurality opinion); id. at 692 (Douglas, J., joined by Black and Marshall, JJ., concurring in part and dissenting in part); Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 659-661 (1971) (opinion of Brennan, J.); id. at 665, n. 1 (opinion of White, J.). 9. Congress apparently also reads our cases as the University did, for it routinely excludes religious activities from general funding programs. See, e.g., 20 U.S.C. § 1062(b) (federal grant program for institutions of higher education; "[n]o grant may be made under this chapter for any educational program, activity, or service related to sectarian instruction or religious worship, or provided by a school or department of divinity"); 20 U.S.C. § 1069c (certain grants to higher education institutions "may not be used . . . for a school or department of divinity or any religious worship or sectarian activity . . ."); 20 U.S.C. § 1132c-3(c) (1988 ed., Supp. V) (federal assistance for renovation of certain academic facilities; "[n]o loan may be made under this part for any educational program, activity or service related to sectarian instruction or religious worship or provided by a school or department of divinity or to an institution in which a substantial portion of its functions is subsumed in a religious mission"); 20 U.S.C. § 1132i(c) (grant program for educational facilities; "no project assisted with funds under this subchapter shall ever be used for religious worship or a sectarian activity or for a school or department of divinity"); 20 U.S.C. § 1213d ("No grant may be made under this chapter for any educational program, activity, or service related to sectarian instruction or religious worship, or provided by a school or department of divinity"); 25 U.S.C. § 3306(a) (1988 ed., Supp. V) (funding for Indian higher education programs; "[n]one of the funds made available under this subchapter may be used for study at any school or department of divinity or for any religious worship or sectarian activity"); 29 U.S.C. § 776(g) (grants for projects and activities for rehabilitation of handicapped persons; "[n]o funds provided under this subchapter may be used to assist in the construction of any facility which is or will be used for religious worship or any sectarian activity"); 42 U.S.C. § 3027(a)(14)(A)(iv) (requiring states seeking federal aid for construction of centers for the elderly to submit plans providing assurances that "the facilit[ies] will not be used and [are] not intended to be used for sectarian instruction or as . . . place[s] for religious worship"); 42 U.S.C. § 5001(a)(2) (1988 ed., Supp. V) (federal grants to support volunteer projects for the elderly, but not including "projects involving the construction, operation, or maintenance of so much of any facility used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place for religious worship"); 42 U.S.C. § 9858k(a) (1988 ed., Supp. V) (no child care and development block grants "shall be expended for any sectarian purpose or activity, including sectarian worship or instruction").
11. The Court draws a distinction between a State's use of public funds to advance its own speech and the State's funding of private speech, suggesting that authority to make content-related choices is at its most powerful when the State undertakes the former. Ante at ___. I would not argue otherwise, see Hazelwood School Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 270-273 (1988), but I do suggest that this case reveals the difficulties that can be encountered in drawing this distinction. There is a communicative element inherent in the very act of funding itself, cf. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 15-19 (1976) (per curiam), and although it is the student speakers who choose which particular messages to advance in the forum created by the University, the initial act of defining the boundaries of the forum is a decision attributable to the University, not the students. In any event, even assuming that private and state speech always may be separated by clean lines and that this case involves only the former, I believe the distinction is irrelevant here because, as is discussed infra, this case does not involve viewpoint discrimination. 12. I do not decide that all viewpoint discrimination in a public university's funding determinations would violate the Free Speech Clause. If, however, the determinations are made on the basis of a reasonable subject matter distinction, but not on a viewpoint distinction, there is no violation. In a limited access forum, a speech restriction must be "reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum" as well as viewpoint-neutral. E.g., Lamb's Chapel, 508 U.S. at ___, quoting Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 806. Because petitioners have not challenged the University's Guideline as unreasonable, I express no opinion on that or on the question whether the reasonableness criterion applies in speech funding cases in the same manner that it applies in limited access forum cases.
13. See also Tr. of Oral Arg. in Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School Dist., O.T. 1992, No. 91-2024, where counsel for the school district charged with enforcing the restriction unequivocally admitted that anyone with an atheistic or anti-religious message would be permitted to use school property under the rules of the forum. Id. at 47, 57-58. The complete exchange during the oral argument in Lamb's Chapel went as follows: