Opinion ID: 1441344
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Changes in Establishment Clause Jurisprudence Since 1981

Text: [¶ 43] The parents urge us to conclude, however, that recent changes in the Supreme Court's analysis of the Establishment Clause have resulted in the elimination of the necessity for the religious exclusion. There is no question that, between 1981 and the present, the lines of demarcation in Establishment Clause analysis have shifted once again. [22] [¶ 44] The changes can be seen both in the tools used by the Court to analyze alleged Establishment Clause violations and in the nature of governmental involvement in religious schools that the Court has become willing to tolerate. [¶ 45] We first examine the changes in the analytical tool utilized by the Supreme Court in these cases. The Lemon Test, announced in 1971, was applied to all school cases in the 1980's. The application of the Lemon Test, however, has been fluid at best. In Nyquist, the Court held that there is no single constitutional caliper for determining whether a state action violates the Establishment Clause and that tests such as those announced in Lemon should be viewed as guidelines. 413 U.S. at 773 n. 31, 93 S.Ct. 2955 (citations omitted). In Mueller v. Allen, 463 U.S. 388, 103 S.Ct. 3062, 77 L.Ed.2d 721 (1983), the Court found the Lemon test to be no more than a helpful signpost. Id. at 394, 103 S.Ct. 3062 (citations omitted). And in Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 104 S.Ct. 1355, 79 L.Ed.2d 604 (1984), it noted that the Lemon Test has never been binding on the Supreme Court. See id. at 679, 104 S.Ct. 1355. [¶ 46] Most recently, in Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 117 S.Ct. 1997, 138 L.Ed.2d 391 (1997), the Court acknowledged the continuing efficacy of a Lemon -like analysis but suggested that the effect and entanglement prongs must be seen as parts of a unitary consideration. As one court noted, [t]he court essentially collapsed the Lemon Test so that the focus is on whether the challenged activity has the effect of advancing religion. Porta v. Klagholz, 19 F.Supp.2d 290, 297 (D.N.J.1998). [¶ 47] We turn then to the recent decisions in which the Supreme Court has reviewed other school aid programs for Establishment Clause compliance. Two decisions bookend those changes: Mueller v. Allen, 463 U.S. 388, 103 S.Ct. 3062, 77 L.Ed.2d 721 (1983) and Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 117 S.Ct. 1997, 138 L.Ed.2d 391. In Mueller, the Court upheld a Minnesota law allowing taxpayers, in computing their state income tax, to deduct expenses incurred in providing for the education of their children, including tuition, transportation, and textbooks, without regard to the secular or religious nature of the school at issue. See 463 U.S. at 390, 103 S.Ct. 3062. The Court accepted the State's secular purpose, stating that governmental assistance programs have consistently survived this inquiry even when they have run afoul of other aspects of the Lemon framework. Id. at 394, 103 S.Ct. 3062. The Mueller Court distinguished Nyquist and relied upon several factors in finding no impermissible effect of advancing religions: the tax deduction is one of several available under Minnesota law; the deduction is available for only educational expenses, not for religious expenses; the tax is available to all parents; and the aid is a benefit to and is channeled through individual parents, not the schools. See id. at 396-99, 103 S.Ct. 3062. The Court held that [t]he historical purposes of the [Establishment] [C]lause simply do not encompass the sort of attenuated financial benefit, ultimately controlled by the private choices of individual parents, that eventually flows to parochial schools from the neutrally available tax benefit at issue in this case. Id. at 400, 103 S.Ct. 3062. [¶ 48] In the decade and a half that followed Mueller, the Court inched further away from its more restrictive line-drawing. In Witters v. Washington Dep't of Servs. for the Blind, 474 U.S. 481, 106 S.Ct. 748, 88 L.Ed.2d 846 (1986), the Court again acknowledged that direct cash subsidies to a religious school would not be approved, but held that the Establishment Clause is not violated every time money previously in the possession of a State is conveyed to a religious institution. Id. at 486, 106 S.Ct. 748. It determined that a single grant of aid to a blind college student for his training to become a pastor did not violate the Clause, noting that no other person had ever sought to use state grant money for that purpose and that the grant monies were provided directly to the student, not to the religious college. See id. at 488, 106 S.Ct. 748. Then in Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills Sch. Dist., 509 U.S. 1, 113 S.Ct. 2462, 125 L.Ed.2d 1 (1993), the Court determined that allowing a school district to provide a sign-language interpreter to accompany a student to his classes at a Catholic High School did not violate the Establishment Clause. Distinguishing those facts from cases involving direct cash subsidies to religious schools, the Court noted that no funds traceable to the government ever find their way into sectarian schools' coffers. Id. at 10, 113 S.Ct. 2462. [¶ 49] Finally, in Agostini, the Court explicitly overruled a prior decision in which it had concluded that the Establishment Clause prevented public school teachers from assisting underprivileged children in religious schools. See Aguilar v. Felton, 473 U.S. 402, 105 S.Ct. 3232, 87 L.Ed.2d 290 (1985). [23] The change in approach resulted from two significant modifications in Supreme Court analysis announced in cases subsequent to Aguilar. See Agostini, 521 U.S. at 223-25, 117 S.Ct. 1997. First, the Court abandoned any notion that placing public employees on parochial grounds inevitably results in the impermissible effect of state-sponsored indoctrination or constitutes a symbolic union between government and religion. Id. at 223, 117 S.Ct. 1997. Second, the Court departed from the rule that all government aid that directly aids the educational functions of religious schools is invalid. Id. at 225, 117 S.Ct. 1997. [¶ 50] Writing for the Court, Justice O'Connor concluded in Agostini that recent Establishment Clause cases had undermined some of the assumptions on which cases decided over the preceding decade had been built, but concluded nonetheless that the general principles used to evaluate alleged Establishment Clause violations remain valid: we continue to ask whether the government acted with the purpose of advancing or inhibiting religion, and the nature of that inquiry has remained largely unchanged.... Likewise we continue to explore whether the aid has the `effect' of advancing or inhibiting religion. Id. at 222-23, 117 S.Ct. 1997 The Court then took pains to identify the limits of its holding, emphasizing that no money flowed to the religious school and that the services of the public employee did not supplant the school's ordinary educational functions or relieve it of costs it would otherwise have borne in the student's education. See id. at 223-31, 117 S.Ct. 1997.