Opinion ID: 197589
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Establishment Clause Claim

Text: At the core of the Establishment Clause is the idea that government cannot favor religion over nonreligion, nor sponsor a particular sect, nor try to encourage participation in or abnegation of religion. Walz v. Tax Comm'n, 397 U.S. 664, 694 (1970) (Harlan, J., concurring) (noting that while disagreements over applications of Establishment Clause are common, its core ideal is well established). In order to vindicate this constitutional guarantee, two tests have long guided judicial review of any challenged legislation: first, the law must have a purpose other than to advance or inhibit religion; second, the primary effect of the law must not be to advance or inhibit religion. See, e.g., Abington School District v. Shempp, 347 U.S. 203, 222 (1963) (The test may be stated as follows: what are the purpose and primary effect of the enactment? If either is the advancement or inhibition of religion -8- then the enactment exceeds the scope of legislative power as circumscribed by the Constitution.). A third practical concern under the Establishment Clause is that the net effect of governmental programs avoid excessive governmental entanglement with religion. Walz, 397 U.S. at 674. These threads were united in the well-known three-part test in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), which provides: First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances or inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion.' Id. at 612-13 (quoting Walz)(citation omitted). The district court applied the Lemon test in the course of holding that FUTA and the RIESA did not violate the Establishment Clause. See 928 F. Supp. at 163-66. This approach was appropriate, for the Supreme Court, despite criticisms of previous applications of the Lemon test, essentially confirmed in Agostini v. Felton, 117 S. Ct. 1997 (1997), that the Lemon criteria still apply. See 117 S. Ct. at 2010, 2015. In Agostini, the Court overruled its Establishment Clause decision in Aguilar v. Felton, 473 U.S. 402 (1985) -- which had barred the New York City Board of Education from sending public school teachers into sectarian private schools to teach remedial classes pursuant to Title I -- but nevertheless stated that the general tests used in analyzing challenged legislation under the Establishment Clause had not changed. The -9- Agostini decision reaffirmed the need to ascertain that laws have a secular purpose and a primary effect other than advancing religion, see 117 S. Ct. at 2010, and explicitly incorporated the entanglement prong into the effects calculus, thereby making the third prong of Lemon a part of the second prong, see id. at 2016. The Court in Agostini noted that what has changed since Aguilar are certain presumptions regarding the effects of neutral laws that incidentally confer benefits to religions. See 117 S. Ct. at 2010-13 (stating that the Court no longer considers the presence of public school employees on parochial school property to lead ineluctably to the impermissible effect of advancing or endorsing religion where their presence is part of neutral program). The district court properly found that the FUTA and RIESA exemptions had neither an impermissible purpose, nor an impermissible effect on religion. First, both the FUTA and the RIESA exemption provisions serve the secular purpose of facilitating the administration of the federal-state unemployment insurance program by excluding from coverage a variety of workers whose employment patterns are irregular or whose wages are not easily accountable. With regard to FUTA, Rojas concedes that the original purpose of the coverage exemptions was to address administrability concerns. She contends, however, that the current 26 U.S.C. 3309, viewed in the wake of the 1970 and 1976 Amendments, reflects the purpose of favoring religion rather than the secular purpose of providing ease of administration. Rojas -10- is unable to direct our attention to, nor can we find, any indications in the legislative history of the 1970 and 1976 Amendments that suggest an impermissible purpose of advancing religion in general or any particular religion. See, e.g., Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 56 (1985) ([T]he First Amendment requires that a statute must be invalidated if it is entirely motivated by a purpose to advance religion.). Moreover, the current exemption for religious employment, even after the amendments, still rests within the context of a variety of other exemptions, all of which appear to share a common secular purpose. Efficient administration of the unemployment compensation system is particularly enhanced through the exemptions for religion because it eliminates the need for the government to review employment decisions made on the basis of religious rationales. These considerations are also true of the exemptions listed in R.I. Gen. Laws 28-42-8(1). The exemption for religions contained therein, when viewed in context, is innocuous. It appears to serve the interest in facilitating the administration of federal and state unemployment benefits programs, and Rojas can point to no other evidence that the purpose that animated adoption was to advance religion. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 585 (1987). In Walz, the Supreme Court upheld property tax exemptions for religious institutions, arguing that such exemptions, although not required by the Free Exercise Clause, were valid governmental actions productive of a benevolent neutrality which will permit -11- religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and without interference. 397 U.S. at 669. Including religious institutions within a set of unemployment tax exemption recipients -- selected on the basis of reducing difficulties in administering an unemployment insurance program -- reflects less of a desire to sponsor religion than the direct property tax exemptions upheld in Walz. Rojas's brief on appeal places much weight on Texas Monthly v. Bullock, 489 U.S. 1 (1989), which struck down a narrow Texas sales and use tax exemption for 'periodicals that are published or distributed by a religious faith and that consist wholly of writings promulgating the teaching of the faith and books that consist wholly of writings sacred to a religious faith.' Id. at 5 (quoting Texas statute). Although Texas Monthly stands for the proposition that a subsidy that is granted only to religious publications and not to other similar publications lacks sufficient breadth to pass scrutiny under the Establishment Clause, it also stated that [i]nsofar as [a tax] subsidy is conferred upon a wide array of non-sectarian groups as well as religious organizations in pursuit of some legitimate secular end, the fact that religious groups benefit incidentally does not deprive the subsidy of the secular purpose and primary effect mandated by the Establishment Clause. 489 U.S. at 14-15. The exemption provisions at issue in the instant case fall within the latter category. We decline Rojas's invitation to read Texas Monthly as requiring that a provision incidentally benefitting -12- religion must grant a like benefit to every group that could also conceivably fall within the secular rationale for the exemption provision. Texas Monthly nowhere requires this underinclusiveness analysis, but instead indicates that when a wide array of groups are benefitted by a provision that pursues a single, unifying, secular end, one of these groups may indeed be religious institutions. In Texas Monthly, the other Texas sales tax exemptions did not serve the same purpose as the narrow exemption for religious periodicals, and thus their existence could not rescue the challenged exemption. By contrast, an adequate array of groups are exempted under the FUTA and RIESA provisions, reinforcing our conclusion that the religious exemptions here serve the legitimate secular purpose of facilitating the administration of the unemployment insurance system.5 The second basic Establishment Clause concern is that of avoiding the effective promotion or advancement of particular religions or of religion in general by the government. Although 5 We therefore need not address the defendants' alternative legal argument in defense of the exemptions, namely that even were the exemption provided only to religions, it would still serve the legitimate secular purpose of decreasing governmental entanglement with religion. It is well established that it is a permissible legislative purpose to alleviate significant governmental interference with the ability of religious organizations to define and carry out their religious missions. Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints v. Amos, 483 U.S. 327, 335 (1987) (upholding exemption for religious institutions from Title VII's prohibition against religious discrimination in employment for secular activities of a nonprofit). But again, we do not need to consider whether the exemptions at issue here are supported on this accommodation rationale. -13- favoritism toward any particular sect is not an issue raised by this appeal, it is not disputed that religious institutions as a whole benefit from the FUTA and RIESA tax exemptions. An incidental benefit to religion does not, however, render invalid a statutory scheme with a valid secular purpose. See, e.g., Agostini, 117 S. Ct. at 2014; Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills Sch. Dist., 509 U.S. 1 (1993); Witters v. Washington Dept. of Servs., 474 U.S. 481, 488-89 (1986); Walz, 397 U.S. at 664. It is also worth noting that while religious employers may be benefitted, the employees of exempted religious institutions, as the appellant has discovered, may be ineligible to enjoy the attendant benefits of the unemployment compensation scheme. Thus, the primary effect of the exemptions is not to force the general public to subsidize religion. Rather, the primary practical effect of the exemptions for religious institutions is to exclude former employees of such institutions from participating in the Rhode Island unemployment insurance system. Finally, as the district court correctly reasoned, entanglement concerns are in fact reduced through the adoption of the exemptions in this case. See 928 F. Supp. at 165.