Opinion ID: 1318757
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: religious neutrality in public schools

Text: Here the policy choice was made by the legislature. There is no reason to believe that when the Legislative Assembly enacted ORS 342.650 in its present form in 1965, it had any aim other than to maintain the religious neutrality of the public schools, to avoid giving children or their parents the impression that the school, through its teacher, approves and shares the religious commitment of one group and perhaps finds that of others less worthy. It would be easy to show that this aim has equal constitutional standing with the teacher's religious self-expression if Oregon, like many states, had adopted an explicit constitutional guarantee against sectarian influence in the public schools. [13] Such a provision was omitted from the education article, Article VIII, of the Oregon Constitution. Carey's compilation of the proceedings of the constitutional convention shows that the version of present Article VIII of the constitution, as reported on August 26, 1857, by the Committee on Education and School Lands, included a provision that instruction in state colleges and the common schools shall be free from party or sectarian bias. On September 2, a minority of the committee presented a version that would have forbidden religious standards criteria for schools and teachers in greater detail. Carey, The Oregon Constitution 179, 231 (1926). [14] The source of Oregon's Article VIII, section 3, is reported to have been Article IX, section 3, of the Iowa Constitution of 1846, which contained no such provision, so the point seems to have had independent importance to the anti-sectarian members of the committee. The minority report was rejected by the convention, sitting in committee of the whole, on September 9. On September 12, the committee of the whole voted to strike the final words of the section, including the provision on sectarian bias, id. at 338, and this was done at the third reading of the education article on September 15, when the journal briefly reports: On motion of Mr. Kelly, the president was authorized to erase all of the latter part of section 3, line four, after the word schools in said line, in the article on education and school lands. Id. at 354. There is no evidence of any explanation or debate of the deletion, and we have found no reference to it in the contemporaneous press accounts of the convention reprinted in Carey or in any other source. Because the stricken portion also specified that schooling between ages four and twenty-one should be free, the motion possibly focused more on cost than on the nonsectarian provision. Nonetheless, the aim of maintaining the religious neutrality of the public schools furthers a constitutional obligation beyond an ordinary policy preference of the legislature. It is the obligation stated in Article VIII, section 3, to provide for a uniform, and general system of Common Schools, which must be done without imposing on the religious freedom under Article I, sections 2 and 3, of the children who attend those schools. It is not necessary to debate how far the ban on fiscal support for religion stated in Article I, section 5, goes beyond narrow financial concerns to imply a larger principle against having government drawn into sponsorship of one or another religion. See Lowe v. City of Eugene, 254 Or. 518, 547-48, 451 P.2d 117, 463 P.2d 360 (1970). Government neutrality also serves to protect the free exercise, and enjoyment of religeous opinions, under Article I, section 3, of those whose opinions differ from what a majority might uncritically accept as the community's official religion. Recognition that freedom of religion for all implies official sponsorship of none has grown with the growing diversity of the nation itself. Two hundred years ago religious toleration could mean toleration merely among Protestant denominations. See, e.g., Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, Art III (1780). [15] Even after Catholics, Jews, other minority faiths, and nonbelievers were accorded the right to follow their own views, toleration did not imply that their views were as good as the community's dominant religion. For those to whom religion is a matter of truth or error rather than opinion, as the constitution says, to tolerate error did not mean that those in a position to speak for the community should not officially proclaim what they firmly believe to be the truth. Those whose faiths thereby would be relegated to second-class status of course might see freedom of religion differently. The main battleground has been the public schools, as the cases under the constitutional proscriptions of sectarian influence and later under the First Amendment show. [16] Parents and lawmakers may and do assume that the hours, days, and years spent in school are the time and the place when a young person is most impressionable by the expressed and implicit orthodoxies of the adult community and most sensitive to being perceived as different from the majority of his or her peers; famous constitutional cases have involved this socializing rather than intellectual function of the schools. [17] In excluding teachers whose dress is a constant and inescapable visual reminder of their religious commitment, laws like ORS 342.650 respect and contribute to the child's right to the free exercise and enjoyment of its religious opinions or heritage, untroubled by being out of step with those of the teacher. The principle is most obvious when the teacher represents the community's dominant religion, but it cannot be limited to that situation. From the Know-Nothing nativism of the mid-19th century, through the battle over the Blaine Amendment, [18] to recent times, contention centered on the role of Catholicism in public schools, symbolized by the dress of priests and nuns, as distinct from mainstream Protestantism, represented by school prayers and the King James translation of the Bible. See Pfeffer, supra, 374-82. It may be a far cry from these historic conflicts to perceive any threat of sectarian influence in the dress of a sect that, in this country, may seem an exotic curiosity. But we are examining the validity of the law against a charge that it denies teachers the freedom to adopt the dress of their respective religions. Neither their religious freedom nor that of their students can depend on calculations which faiths are more likely than others to snatch a young soul from a rival creed. The tides of immigration and of homegrown religions have changed before and are changing again, and what is exotic today may tomorrow gain many thousands of adherents and potential majority status in some communities. [19] In other contexts we have held that expression that could not constitutionally be prohibited outright may nevertheless be found incompatible with the performance of an official professional role. In Burt v. Blumenauer, 299 Or. 55, 74, 699 P.2d 168 (1985), we recognized that public advocacy of a vote for or against a disputed ballot measure, normally the essence of individual free speech, may under narrowly defined circumstances be incompatible with an individual's public duties. In re Lasswell, 296 Or. 121, 673 P.2d 855 (1983), held that a disciplinary rule prohibiting a prosecutor's extrajudicial comments on a pending trial is not an unconstitutional infringement of free speech if it is narrowly limited to actual incompatibility between the speech and the prosecutor's official function. [20] Interestingly enough, the issue of religious dress has arisen in trial courtrooms as well as in classrooms when a Catholic priest who was a member of the bar asserted the right to appear in his religious garb. See La Rocca v. Lane, 37 N.Y.2d 575, 376 N.Y.S.2d 93, 338 N.E.2d 606 (1975), cert. den. 424 U.S. 968, 96 S.Ct. 1464, 47 L.Ed.2d 734 (1976); People v. Rodriguez, 101 Misc.2d 536, 424 N.Y.S.2d 600 (1979); Gold v. McShane, 74 A.D.2d 860, 426 N.Y. S.2d 504 (1980), in which the New York courts apparently left the issue to the discretion of individual trial courts. We conclude that ORS 342.650 does not impose an impermissible requirement for teaching in the public schools if it is properly limited to actual incompatibility with the teaching function.