Opinion ID: 721330
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Why This Case Matters

Text: 66 This case matters because it breaches the limits of judicial authority to achieve results that are offensive to religious liberty and the sound upbringing of our children. The panel's departures from standard rules of judicial restraint have been explained above. It has long been thought prudent, indeed obligatory, for a court to avoid discussing difficult but unnecessary constitutional issues. Spector Motor Service, Inc. v. McLaughlin, 323 U.S. 101, 105, 65 S.Ct. 152, 154, 89 L.Ed. 101 (1944). Here, neither plaintiffs' lack of standing nor trepidation over a premature declaration of facial invalidity persuaded the panel to forebear. 67 But beyond the errors of judicial craft lies a deeper significance. The panel's decision is the latest in a long line of cases whose inevitable consequence has been to remake society in a secular image. Two examples suffice: courts have held that the mere existence of a Good Friday holiday establishes the Christian religion, 12 and the venerable inscription on a courthouse The World Needs God likewise constitutionally offends ... someone. 13 Only by recognizing the absurdity of holding otherwise have courts allowed us still to pledge that we are one nation under God, indivisible and to maintain In God We Trust on the currency. When our cultural heritage and tradition, indeed the three-millennial history of the Western world threatens to be erased by three decades of federal court pronouncements, something is amiss. 14 As Prof. Stephen Carter arrestingly concluded, our elite cultural institutions, including federal courts, have imposed on us an historically unprecedented culture of disbelief. 15 68 The elites' tin ear for religious belief and practice has been particularly evident in cases regarding the public schools. Federal courts often seem unable to draw fundamental distinctions between school-sponsored religious establishment and benign teaching about religion or, as in this case, students' constitutionally protected free exercise of speech and religion. 16 School officials, averse to the emotional and financial costs of litigation, have systematically excised religious references from school curricula and activities in response to the caselaw. This widespread Establishment Clause misconstruction occurs notwithstanding that Supreme Court justices have repeatedly acknowledged the importance of teaching about religion in public schools 17 and that no Supreme Court authority limits students' nondisruptive religious self-expression. Not to belabor the point, I note that Congress passed and the Supreme Court upheld the Equal Access Act, a law guaranteeing students' rights to meet in religious clubs on public school property, in order to overturn lower federal court decisions to the contrary. 18 Only last summer, President Clinton spoke of the problem of hostility to religion in public schools and instructed the Departments of Justice and Education to formulate guidelines for the protection of public school students' religious speech and conduct. 19 Every time a federal court writes an unduly broad Establishment Clause decision concerning public schools, we encourage further misunderstandings, to the detriment of students' constitutional rights and the goal of teaching about religion in public schools. 69 The courts' broad decisions in this area are not only in my view, uncompelled by precedent, they are also extraordinarily shortsighted. Decisions fostering rigidly secular public education strip school officials of moral tools that lie at the heart of the educational process. As the Rev. Martin Luther King explained: 70 The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but with no morals. 71 We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. 72 THE WORDS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. 41 (ed. Coretta Scott King) (1993). Character education, whose roots lie deepest and firmest in precepts of religious morality, has been the ultimate casualty of the courts' careless Establishment Clause jurisprudence. 73 Eager judicial intrusions into the educational process have also spawned decrees that inhibit school leaders' flexibility to accommodate varying social conditions. Intuitively, it appears that different approaches are required to encourage educational success, including character building success, in a Chicago ghetto, a Dallas suburb or a small Tennessee town. Yet local control of schools, a cornerstone of American public education, has had to give way to a growing body of federalized, nationally binding Establishment Clause jurisprudence. 74 Paraphrasing George Orwell, we have sunk to the point at which it becomes one's duty to restate the obvious. What seems obvious to me is that disputes like these, deeply enmeshed in social and political policy, are not well handled by the adjudication process. Court decrees, focused on the single goal of pure non-establishment, supplant decisions based on compromise and consensus which reflect the multifaceted wisdom of the people acting through democratically accountable elected officials and educators. Moreover, the accumulated precedential effect of the courts' secularizing decisions has stretched beyond each particular dispute to discourage and thwart moral and religious elements in public education. 20 It is precisely because of the tension between adjudicative decisionmaking and well-rounded social policy-making that courts fashioned self-constraints on declarations of facial unconstitutionality. It is because the Founders recognized the distinction between mere adjudication and lawmaking that Article III requires a real case or controversy, implicating standing to sue, ripeness and justiciability. A forthright sense of judicial modesty also compels such limitations on the judicial process. Neither judicial modesty nor principles of judicial restraint have been notably evident in decisions involving religion and the public schools. 75 This case, striking down Mississippi's attempt to accommodate students' desire--and constitutional right--voluntarily to pray aloud at school, is a paradigm of the errors that bedevil Establishment Clause jurisprudence. The court reached out to condemn the entire statute on its face even though no plaintiff had been injured or could realistically assert standing, and even though certain constitutional applications of it are mandated by our caselaw. The court's decision was premised not on actual facts but upon a hypothetical, worst-case application of the statute. The court dealt unsympathetically, to say the least, with the motivation for the statute, a motivation shared by the vast majority of the American people that life is more meaningful, education more dignified, morality fortified when voluntary, student-initiated prayer is permitted. It was not the court's prerogative under traditional principles of judicial restraint to strike down this statute. I DISSENT from the denial of rehearing en banc.