Opinion ID: 2058058
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Eulitt v. State of Maine Department of Education

Text: [¶ 39] The parents in Eulitt, argued that the State's asserted interest in maintaining the sectarian school exclusion in order to avoid an Establishment Clause violation was no longer valid after Zelman, undermining the First Circuit's decision in Strout. 386 F.3d at 348-49. [¶ 40] Because it concluded that the Free Exercise Clause defines the scope of the fundamental right to religion incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee, id. at 353, the Eulitt court assessed whether section 2951(2) comports with the Free Exercise Clause, and then applied rational basis scrutiny to any further equal protection inquiry, id. at 354. The court held that section 2951(2) imposes no impermissible burden on religion because it does not prohibit attendance at religious schools or prevent parents from choosing religious education for their children. Id. at 354-55. It reasoned that the guarantee of protection from government encroachment does not translate into an affirmative requirement that public entities fund religious activity simply because they fund the secular equivalent of that activity. Id. [¶ 41] Finding that section 2951(2) did not violate the parents' free exercise rights, the court stated that we have no occasion to ponder whether Maine's Establishment Clause defense constitutes a compelling interest that justifies the challenged restriction. Id. at 356. The court applied rational basis scrutiny to the statute, pursuant to which the burden was on the parents as challengers of the statute to demonstrate that there exists no fairly conceivable set of facts that could ground a rational relationship between the challenged classification and the government's legitimate goals. Id. In Eulitt, the parents conceded that if the rational basis test applied, their equal protection claim failed as a matter of law. Id. [¶ 42] The Court in Eulitt read Locke broadly, stating that the decision there recognized that state entities, in choosing how to provide education, may act upon their legitimate concerns about excessive entanglement with religion, even though the Establishment Clause may not require them to do so. Id. at 355.