Opinion ID: 2585351
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Excessive governmental entanglement with religion.

Text: Plaintiffs also contend that permitting a religious entity to invoke an exeruption to landmark preservation laws does not simply restore to religious entities the power to affect their own interests, as the Court of Appeal reasoned, but necessarily enmeshes those bodies in a substantial exercise of governmental power. To determine if the state is impermissibly entangled with religious activity under the Lemon test, the court considers the character and purposes of the institutions that are benefited, the nature of the aid that the State provides, and the resulting relationship between the government and the religious authority. ( Lemon v. Kurtzman, supra, 403 U.S. at p. 615, 91 S.Ct. 2105; see also Jimmy Swaggart Ministries v. Cal. Bd. of Equalization (1990) 493 U.S. 378, 393, 110 S.Ct. 688, 107 L.Ed.2d 796.) Here, of course, religious institutions benefit from the exemption. However, the state provides no aid other than leaving noncommercial properties owned by religious entities alone if the owner seeks exemption. The exemption process does not create any relationship between those entities and the state. The state itself is not implicated in the exemption process. The owner, after objecting to imposition of landmark status, may exempt itself from a local landmark preservation law. The owner may do so by determining in a public forum that it will suffer substantial hardship in carrying out its religious mission because the restrictions accompanying that status will deprive it of the economic benefit it would otherwise receive from the property when that benefit is necessary to carry out the owner's religious mission, will deprive it of the reasonable use of the property to carry out the owner's religious mission, or will deprive it of a use appropriate to carrying out the owner's religious mission. None of this enmeshes the government in religion. There is no delegation of substantial governmental authority to the religious entities that own exempt properties, and thus no entanglement between them and the state. Unlike the authority granted to churches to preclude the grant of liquor licenses to establishments near a church or school that was found to violate the establishment clause in Larkin v. Grendel's Den (1982) 459 U.S. 116, 103 S.Ct. 505, 74 L.Ed.2d 297, here there is no opportunity for favoritism by the religious entity and no appearance of joint exercise of legislative power by the church and the state. The exercise of legislative power ends with the enactment of the enabling statutes. While the nature of the public forum in which the hardship determination is made is not fixed by sections 25373 and 37361, it is not a governmental forum. The requirement that the determination of substantial hardship be made in a public forum appears to contemplate a public hearing at which the owner's assertion of hardship may be questioned, but there is no requirement of governmental approval or review of a hardship determination. A declaration by the owner of the property that an objection to imposition of landmark status was made, a public hearing held, and a determination of substantial hardship made and filed with the designated local agency, should suffice. The third prong of the Lemon test is also satisfied. The most recent federal circuit court decision addressing the establishment clause implications of an exemption statute supports our conclusion. In Ehlers-Renzi v. Connelly School of the Holy Child, Inc. (4th Cir.2000) 224 F.3d 283, [7] the law challenged on establishment clause grounds exempted parochial schools located on land owned or leased by a religious organization from a special exception requirement imposed on other owners who sought to build nonresidential facilities in a residential zone. The issue arose when a Roman Catholic college preparatory school notified neighboring landowners that it had elected to exempt itself from seeking a special exception for the expansion of its facilities. The court recognized that accommodation of religion is an authorized and sometimes mandatory aspect of Establishment Clause jurisprudence ( id. at p. 287), and that such accommodation satisfies the Lemon test, as adapted to exemptions in Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, supra, 483 U.S. 327, 107 S.Ct. 2862, 97 L.Ed.2d 273. Addressing the three prongs of the Lemon test, the court reasoned that the secular purpose test was met in a facial challenge if a plausible secular purpose appeared on the face of the law. It had no difficulty in finding such a purpose. The exemption made it possible to avoid interference with the religious mission of parochial schools that might occur if they were subjected to the otherwise applicable requirements of the zoning ordinance. By allowing the exemption the county simply stepped out of the way of religion and relieved the school of having to justify its religious or religion-related needs. This also spared the county from having to resolve disputes with religious underpinnings. In short, the low threshold of this first Lemon prong is readily cleared by the Zoning Ordinance's plausible purpose of extricating Montgomery County from these involvements in religion. ( Ehlers-Renzi v. Connelly School of the Holy Child, Inc., supra, 224 F.3d at p. 289.) The parallel to the instant case is obvious. No actual interference was deemed necessary to justify the exemption. The court looked only to whether the legislative body had a plausible sectarian purpose for the exemption, and, as suggested in Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, supra, 483 U.S. 327, 107 S.Ct. 2862, 97 L.Ed.2d 273, concluded that relieving the school of potential interference with its religious activity satisfied that test. The court found the second prong of the Lemon testwhether the exemption had a principal or primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion was also satisfied, concluding that an exemption that simply allowed a religious school to advance its purposes was not constitutionally prohibited. The government itself was not, through its own activities or influence, advancing religion. ( Ehlers-Renzi v. Connelly School of the Holy Child, Inc., supra, 224 F.3d at p. 291.) The third, or excessive entanglement, prong was met since the exemption had the effect of disentangling the government from intrusion into religious matters. ( Id., at p. 292.) Again, the parallels to the instant case are obvious. An exemption from a landmark preservation law simply allows the property owner to use the property as it did before landmark status was imposed. By permitting the religious organization that owns the property to exempt itself, sections 25373 and 37361 avoid any governmental entanglement with religion. We conclude therefore, that sections 25373 and 37361 do not run afoul of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.