Opinion ID: 1318757
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: oregon's guarantees of religious freedom

Text: Cooper's case is not one of declining to comply with an otherwise valid law on grounds of personal religious belief. The law here at issue is not a general regulation, neutral toward religion on its face and in its policy, like the unemployment benefits standards that we sustained against attack under the Oregon Constitution (though not under the First Amendment) by claimants who had been discharged for religiously motivated conduct in Smith v. Employment Division, 301 Or. 209, 721 P.2d 445 (1986) and Black v. Employment Division, 301 Or. 221, 721 P.2d 451 (1986). The cases would be comparable if a school regulation prescribed how teachers should dress while on duty without taking account of religious considerations. Then we would have only an issue of statutory authority to make such a regulation, see Hysong v. Gallitzin School Dist., 164 Pa. 629, 30 A. 482 (1894); Neuhaus v. Federico, 12 Or.App. 314, 505 P.2d 939 (1973), and an individual claim to exemption on religious grounds. See, e.g., Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 U.S. ___, 106 S.Ct. 1310, 89 L.Ed.2d 478 (1986) (military regulation prohibiting headgear indoors applied to Jewish servicemen's yarmulkes); Menora v. Illinois High School Ass'n, 683 F.2d 1030 (7th Cir.1982) (rule forbidding headwear while playing basketball applied to yarmulkes). But ORS 342.650 is not neutral toward religion. On the contrary, the religious significance of the teacher's dress is the specific target of this law. The law singles out a teacher's religious dress because it is religious and to the extent that its religious significance is apparent when the wearer is engaged in teaching. The issue therefore is whether the law infringes the right guaranteed to all men [10] by Article I, section 2, of the Oregon Constitution to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences, or control[s] the free exercise, and enjoyment of religeous opinions, or interfere[s] with the rights of conscience contrary to Article I, section 3. This court sometimes has treated these guarantees and the First Amendment's ban on laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion [11] as identical in meaning, City of Portland v. Thornton, 174 Or. 508, 512, 149 P.2d 972 (1942); but identity of meaning or even of text does not imply that the state's laws will not be tested against the state's own constitutional guarantees before reaching the federal constraints imposed by the Fourtenth Amendment, or that verbal formulas developed by the United States Supreme Court in applying the federal text also govern application of the state's comparable clauses. See, e.g., State v. Brown, 301 Or. 268, 721 P.2d 1357 (1986) (searches and seizures), State v. Kennedy, 295 Or. 260, 666 P.2d 1316 (1983) (double jeopardy); Hewitt v. SAIF, 294 Or. 33, 653 P.2d 970 (1982) (sex discrimination) [12] . What is at issue in a constitutional dispute rarely is what a constitutional text means but how to effectuate that meaning in the disputed setting. Judicial formulas or factors are not themselves the law but aids to analysis that a court from time to time may employ, rephrase, or replace with a better interpretation of their constitutional source. The guarantees of religious freedom in Article I provide: Section 2. All men shall be secure in the Natural right, to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences. Section 3. No law shall in any case whatever control the free exercise, and enjoyment of religeous (sic) opinions or interfere with the rights of conscience. Section 4. No religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office of trust or profit. Section 5. No money shall be drawn from the Treasury for the benefit of any religeous (sic), or theological institution, nor shall any money be appropriated for the payment of any religeous (sic) services in either house of the Legislative Assembly. Section 6. No person shall be rendered incompetent as a witness, or juror in consequence of his opinions on matters of religeon (sic); nor be questioned in any Court of Justice touching his religeous (sic) belief to affect the weight of his testimony. Section 7. The mode of administering an oath, or affirmation shall be such as may be most consistent with, and binding upon the conscience of the person to whom such oath or affirmation may be administered. This court in fact has interpreted the meaning of these guarantees independently, sometimes with results contrary to those reached by the United States Supreme Court. See, e.g., Smith v. Employment Division, supra ; Salem College & Academy, Inc. v. Employment Division, 298 Or. 471, 695 P.2d 25 (1985); Dickman v. School Dist. 62C, 232 Or. 238, 366 P.2d 533 (1961), cert. den. 371 U.S. 823, 83 S.Ct. 41, 9 L.Ed.2d 62 (1962). The religion clauses of Oregon's Bill of Rights, Article I, sections 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, are more than a code. They are specifications of a larger vision of freedom for a diversity of religious beliefs and modes of worship and freedom from state-supported official faiths or modes of worship. The cumulation of guarantees, more numerous and more concrete than the opening clause of the First Amendment, reinforces the significance of the separate guarantees. Article I, section 4, for instance, forbids religious tests specifically as a qualification for any office of trust or profit; but in the total context of sections 2, 3, 6 and 7 it would be difficult to argue that the government could impose a religious test on employment in a position that technically is not an office of trust or profit, for instance in the public schools, on the grounds that such employment is a mere privilege. Likewise, the present law cannot be sustained simply on grounds that it does not interfere with the free exercise of religion because it regulates conduct rather than religious beliefs or verbal expression of opinion and worship. On that theory, the law could equally ban wearing religious dress while teaching in private schools, or for that matter in public generally, without infringing the free exercise of religion. Such a theory would deny the importance of dress and other external symbols of individual and communal commitment to one's faith that certainly were widely understood to represent (in the literal sense of that word) the practice of one's religion when the constitutional guarantees were adopted. In some branches of Judaism and Christianity particular modes of dress, although voluntary, may be essential to an adherent's sense of religious identity; in Islamic and other more encompassing religious communities, departure from prescribed dress may mean self-excommunication or lead to actual communal punishment. Thus, a law restricting dress specifically for being religious dress cannot stand as a regulation of conduct rather than belief or worship. If such a law is to be valid, it must be justified by a determination that religious dress necessarily contravenes the wearer's role or function at the time and place beyond any realistic means of accommodation. The compatibility of religious dress with the role of public school teachers is an old issue under state laws and constitutions. Generally it involved teaching by nuns while wearing the habits of their orders. It is, of course, a different question whether a constitution itself is claimed to forbid the display of the teacher's religious commitment in the public school or whether a ban on religious dress adopted by law or properly delegated rule contravenes the teacher's religious freedom. In two often cited cases, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania first held that wearing religious dress did not constitute sectarian teaching, Hysong v. Gallitzin School Dist., supra ; but after the legislature enacted a law much like ORS 342.650, the court sustained the act. Commonwealth v. Herr, 229 Pa. 132, 78 A. 68 (1910). Similar regulations were sustained in New York, O'Connor v. Hendrick, 184 N.Y. 421, 77 N.E. 612 (1906), and in New Mexico, Zellers v. Huff, 55 N.M. 501, 236 P.2d 949 (1951); challenges to tolerating religious dress in the classroom rather than to rules forbidding such dress were rejected in North Dakota, Gerhardt v. Heid, 66 N.D. 444, 267 N.W. 127 (1936); Indiana, State ex rel Johnson v. Boyd, 217 Ind. 348, 28 N.E.2d 256 (1940); Connecticut, New Haven v. Torrington, 132 Conn. 194, 43 A.2d 455 (1945); Kentucky, Rawlings v. Butler, 290 S.W.2d 801 (Ky.1956); and Ohio, Moore v. Board of Ed., 4 Ohio Misc. 257, 212 N.E.2d 833 (1965). The bare citations do not reveal their historic and embattled settings. In the Indiana case, the school trustees of the City of Vincennes took over parochial school buildings and paid the salaries of Roman Catholic teachers when those schools could not open during the depression year of 1933-34, confronting the trustees with an emergency to provide school facilities for more than 800 additional school children that the court found might well be temporary. State ex rel. Johnson v. Boyd, supra, 217 Ind. at 367, 28 N.E.2d 256. Decisions tolerating nuns' garb in the public schools were superseded by a popular referendum in North Dakota as well as by the legislature in Pennsylvania. Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom 413 (1953). Oregon's 1923 predecessor to ORS 342.650 dates from the period of anti-Catholic intolerance that also gave us the initiative measure against private schools struck down in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925). The courts' tolerance of overt religious symbolism in public schools has differed over time and perhaps with the religious composition of different communities. Looking beyond the specific facts of the cases, however, the decisions generally have been that more than a teacher's religious dress is needed to show a forbidden sectarian influence in the classroom, but that a rule against such religious dress is permissible to avoid the appearance of sectarian influence, favoritism, or official approval in the public school. The policy choice must be made in the first instance by those with lawmaking or delegated authority to make rules for the schools. The courts' role is to see whether the rule stays within that authority and within the constitution and, if necessary, to give the rule a constitutional interpretation.