Opinion ID: 1169485
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: oregon constitutional guarantees

Text: The Academy contended in the Court of Appeals that if it were not exempted by the statutes, as it claims to be, those statutes would violate both the Oregon and the United States Constitutions. The Court of Appeals held that the statutory distinction between church-supported and independent religious schools constitutes an establishment of religion forbidden by the First Amendment, and it stated that [i]n view of our conclusion with respect to the federal Constitution, we need not, and do not, consider the Oregon Constitution. 61 Or. App. at 618 n. 1, 659 P.2d at 417 n. 1. That approach departed from the judicial responsibility to determine the state's own law before deciding whether the statute falls short of federal constitutional standards, see State v. Atkinson, 298 Or. 1, 688 P.2d 832 (1984); State v. Kennedy, 295 Or. 260, 666 P.2d 1316 (1983); Hewitt v. SAIF, 294 Or. 33, 653 P.2d 970 (1982); Sterling v. Cupp, 290 Or. 611, 625 P.2d 123 (1981); State v. Scharf, 288 Or. 451, 605 P.2d 690 (1980). It is, of course, proper to take account of federal requirements (in this case statutory as well as constitutional) in deciding what the state's law is, see Tharalson v. Dept. of Rev., 281 Or. 9, 573 P.2d 298 (1978); but, as already noted, the state cannot violate its own constitution in order to satisfy a federal program that Congress has not made obligatory under the Supremacy Clause. We therefore examine the issues raised under the Oregon Constitution. The Academy invokes the sections of Article I dealing with freedom of conscience and of religion as well as the guarantee of equal privileges and immunities stated in section 20. [8] We do not accept the Academy's contention that the statutory obligation to provide unemployment coverage for its employees would invade its religious freedom even if it were applied equally to all schools or all religious organizations along with other employers, without distinctions of organizational form or religious affiliation. The Academy argues that the obligation either to pay a payroll tax or to reimburse the state for unemployment compensation paid to its former employees burdens its exercise of its religious mission in a number of respects. Most of these burdens are either financial obligations or clerical obligations ancillary to compliance with the financial obligations. As to financial burdens, the question of the historic tax exemptions for religious institutions has been whether the practice is a forbidden subsidy or establishment of religion not whether exemption is required. [9] A number of state constitutions, not including Oregon's, exempt religious institutions along with others from taxes, [10] but petitioner cites no support for the proposition that exemption from common financial exactions follows from guarantees of free exercise of religion or conscience alone. [11] The exaction here is in no way based on activities or resources that are more characteristic of schools than of other kinds of employers or institutions, let alone on a school's religious character or the content of its programs. The obligation to provide unemployment coverage focuses solely on the economic and social aspect of the employment relation and the cost that unemployment imposes on the discharged employee and on society. It is not even an inescapable tax burden, because the law allows a nonprofit employer instead to reimburse the state unemployment compensation fund in amounts equal to the actual unemployment benefits attributed to a claimant's service for the employer. ORS 657.505(8); 26 U.S.C. § 3309(a)(2); cf. In the Matter of Northwestern Lutheran Academy, 290 N.W.2d at 850. These payments are financial burdens only in the same sense that the costs of employing paid workers at all are financial burdens; a religious association engaged in the free exercise of worship or other religious activity without employing paid personnel pays no unemployment tax. As to the alleged administrative and clerical burdens, such as posting notices, filing reports and keeping payroll records subject to inspection by the Employment Division, these requirements, too, are tailored to the economic aspect of the employment relation and not to any activities peculiarly characteristic either of schools or of religious programs. They are not different in principle from a host of other secular regulatory requirements such as health inspections of cafeteria workers or kitchens, safety inspection of school busses, and licensing of drivers. Two of the Academy's other claims under the free exercise clauses deserve attention. One is that the Academy cannot maintain the doctrinal standards required of its employees and discharge an employee for failing to meet those standards without opening its doctrines and faith to Employment Division scrutiny in protracted and expensive contests over unemployment benefits, administrative determinations that will entangle the state in religion. This eventuality can adequately be dealt with if and when it happens; we have no reason to believe that discharges of school employees over matters of religious doctrine are so frequent as to require the employer's entire exemption from the unemployment compensation system on that account. [12] There is substance to the Academy's second claim, that the distinction made by the unemployment compensation law between church-related and independent religious schools in effect compels the Academy to reorganize as a church or affiliate with a church in order to avoid liability for unemployment compensation. Although the Academy presents this as a direct claim of religious freedom, it is a result of the statutory distinction and would disappear if that distinction did not exist. The claim therefore is bolstered by invoking the guarantee of equal privileges and immunities of Article I, section 20. Against that, it might be argued that distinctions based on organizational form such as, for instance, between incorporated and unincorporated enterprises ordinarily cause no constitutional problem of equal treatment, so that the similar distinctions among religious schools become problematic only by virtue of the constitutional clauses dealing with religious freedom. See Carmichael v. Southern Coal & Coke Co., supra (sustaining FUTA against claims under the Fourteenth Amendment). It is not crucial to decide how much Article I, section 20 contributes to petitioner's claim that the state cannot extend to church-affiliated religious schools an immunity that does not upon the same terms ... equally belong to unaffiliated religious schools like itself. [13] Equality of privileges among religious institutions is implicit in the religion clauses themselves. Article I, sections 2 and 3 do not speak of religion in the singular; nor do they refer to churches. They speak of men's rights to worship according to the dictates of their own consciences and the enjoyment of religious opinions in the plural. Religious pluralism is at the historic core of American guarantees of religious freedom. This pluralism was expressed at Oregon's constitutional convention as the main reason for separating the state from churches and religion. The Academy quotes Judge Matthew P. Deady, president of the convention, defending the separation between the state and churches (and the proscription of employing a chaplain, Or. Const., Art. I, § 5) [b]ecause the country contains persons of all religious denominations, as well as nonbelievers, and delegate Waymire: The people of this country were composed of every shade of opinion upon the subject of religion, from the half-crazed fanatic to the unbelieving atheist. Carey, A History of The Oregon Constitution, 300-301 (1926). The free exercise of religion and rights of conscience, Or. Const., Art. I, § 2, may not relieve religious schools from providing unemployment insurance for their employees, but if the state chooses to exempt organizations from that duty by virtue of their religious character, it cannot discriminate among otherwise similar religious schools by their structural relationship with one or another form of church or religious congregation. The Court of Appeals observed: It hardly needs to be said that there are vast differences in Biblical interpretations among Christian sects. Although petitioner depends on 60 to 80 Salem churches for support, the doctrine it teaches may not be coextensive with that of each of the churches. By maintaining its independence, which petitioner's administrator testified it wishes to do, petitioner, through its governing body, can develop and change its doctrine as it sees fit, without regard to whether any of its supporting churches disapprove. That is its right. By requiring a school to submit to the control of a church or affiliation of churches to receive the exemption, ORS 657.072 effectively grants the church the power to determine the school's doctrine, thereby infringing on the right of citizens to develop, independently, their own set of beliefs as well as discouraging the multiplicity of sects. That the legislature cannot do. 61 Or. App. at 628, 659 P.2d at 422. If three religious schools were subjected to significantly different taxes or other legal burdens, not by virtue of differences in their functions and operations, but because one was operated by church officials, another by persons separately appointed by a church congregation to conduct a school, and the third by persons independent of any organization describing itself as a church yet equally devoted to the teaching of religious opinions as that term is used in Article I, section 3, they hardly would all be equally secure to exercise their rights under that section and section 2 according to the dictates of their own consciences. For the same reason, church affiliation cannot be made one of the terms on which equality may be conditioned under Article I, section 20, with respect to privileges or immunities that are not themselves guaranteed, as tax exemption is not. [14] When the United States Supreme Court sustained tax exemption of the property of religious organizations, the Court noted the wide range of New York's exemption, and it wrote: [New York] has not singled out one particular church or religious group or even churches as such; rather, it has granted exemption to all houses of religious worship within a broad class of property owned by nonprofit, quasi-public corporations which include hospitals, libraries, playgrounds, scientific, professional, historical, and patriotic groups. Walz v. Tax Commission, 397 U.S. 664, 673, 90 S.Ct. 1409, 1413, 25 L.Ed.2d 697, 703-04 (1970). Two concurring opinions stressed the same point. [15] Discrimination between religious entities organized as or by churches and similar entities not so organized has troubled other state courts. In a Pennsylvania case, five schools were affiliated with churches and were found to be operated primarily for religious purposes, but a sixth religious school was operated by an independent nonprofit corporation unaffiliated with any church. The court held the organizational distinction made by the statute offensive to the free exercise clause of the first amendment. Christian School Ass'n v. Com. Dept. of Labor, 55 Pa.Cmwlth.Ct. 555, 569, 423 A.2d 1340, 1347 (1980). A California court avoided the dilemma by holding two organizations conducting Christian clubs, camps, and conference centers to be churches within the meaning of the statute. Young Life Campaign v. Patino, 122 Cal. App.3d 559, 176 Cal. Rptr. 23 (1981). The Colorado Supreme Court, on the other hand, held the Young Life organization not to be a church but sustained the resulting discrimination between church-related and independent religious organizations as being justified by a compelling state interest in providing for unemployed workers. Young Life v. Div. of Employment & Training, 650 P.2d 515 (Colo. 1982). Although Colorado's constitutional guarantee of religious freedom provides: Nor shall any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship, Colo. Const., Art. II, § 4, the court declined to give this specific proscription of religious discrimination any independent meaning. Id. at 526. [16] As our earlier discussion shows, we agree more with the Pennsylvania court's approach than with the Colorado court's. If the state chooses to oblige religious schools along with others to provide unemployment security for their employees, we believe that a court need not weigh the state's objective to determine whether, in the court's opinion, it is compelling, nor, on the other hand, that the state may assert compelling interests in order to discriminate between otherwise indistinguishable religious activities by their sectarian affiliations.