Court Opinion

ID: 9428743
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:24:39.220201+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:14.939956
License: Public Domain

Justice White,
with whom Justice Rehnquist joins, dissenting.
I concur in the dissent of Justice Rehnquist with respect to standing. I also dissent on the merits.
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It will be helpful first to indicate what occurred in the lower courts and what the Court now proposes to do. Based on two reports of a Magistrate, the District Court held unconstitutional the Minnesota limitation denying an exemption to religious organizations receiving less than 50 percent of their funding from their own members. The Magistrate recommended this action on the ground that the limitation could not pass muster under the second criterion set down in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971), for identifying an unconstitutional establishment of religion — that the principal or primary effect of the statute is one that neither enhances nor inhibits religion. The 50-percent limitation failed this test because it subjected some churches to far more rigorous requirements than others, the effect being to “severely inhibit plaintiffs religious activities.” App. to Juris. Statement A-63. This created a preference offensive to the Establishment Clause. Id., at A-33.1 The Magistrate relied on the inhibiting effect of the 50-percent rule without ref*259erence to whether or not it was the principal or primary effect of the limitation. In any event, the Magistrate recommended, and the District Court agreed, that the exemption from registration be extended to all religious organizations.
The Court of Appeals agreed with the District Court that the 50-percent rule violated the Establishment Clause. Its ruling, however, was on the ground that the limitation failed to satisfy the first Lemon criterion — that the statute have a secular rather than a religious purpose. The court conceded that the Act as a whole had the valid secular purpose of preventing fraudulent or deceptive practices in the solicitation of funds in the name of charity. The court also thought freeing certain organizations from regulation served a valid purpose because for those organizations public disclosure of funding would not significantly enhance the availability of information to contributors. Patriotic and fraternal societies that limit solicitation to voting members and certain charitable organizations that do not solicit in excess of $10,000 annually from the public fell into this category. But the court found no sound secular legislative purpose for the 50-percent limitation with respect to religious organizations because it “appears to be designed to shield favored sects, while continuing to burden other sects.” 637 F. 2d 562, 567. The challenged provision, the Court of Appeals said, “expressly separates two classes of religious organizations and makes the separation for no valid secular purpose that has been suggested by defendants. Inexplicable disparate treatment will not generally be attributed to accident; it seems much more likely that at some stage of the legislative process special solicitude for particular religious organizations affected the choice of statutory language. The resulting discrimination is constitutionally invidious.” Id., at 568. The Court of Appeals went on to say that if it were necessary to apply the second part of the Lemon test, the provision would also fail to survive that examination because it advantaged some organizations and disadvantaged others.
*260In this Court, the case is given still another treatment. The Lemon v. Kurtzman tests are put aside because they are applicable only to laws affording uniform benefit to all religions, not to provisions that discriminate among religions. Rather, in cases of denominational preference, the Court says that “our precedents demand that we treat the law as suspect and that we apply strict scrutiny in adjudging its constitutionality.” Ante, at 246. The Court then invalidates the challenged limitation.
It does so by first declaring that the 50-percent rule makes explicit and deliberate distinctions between different religious organizations. The State’s submission that the 50-percent limitation is a law based on secular criteria which happens not to have an identical effect on all religious organizations is rejected. The Court then holds that the challenged rule is not closely fitted to serve any compelling state interest and rejects each of the reasons submitted by the State to demonstrate that the distinction between contributions solicited from members and from nonmembers is a sensible one. Among others, the Court rejects the proposition that membership control is an adequate safeguard against deceptive solicitations of the public. The ultimate conclusion is that the exemption provision violates the Establishment Clause.
II
I have several difficulties with this disposition of the case. First, the Court employs a legal standard wholly different from that applied in the courts below. The premise for the Court’s standard is that the challenged provision is a deliberate and explicit legislative preference for some religious denominations over others. But there was no such finding in the District Court. That court proceeded under the second Lemon test and then relied only on the disparate impact of the provision. There was no finding of a discriminatory or preferential legislative purpose. If this case is to be judged by a standard not employed by the courts below and if the *261new standard involves factual issues or even mixed questions of law and fact that have not been addressed by the District Court, the Court should not itself purport to make these factual determinations. It should remand to the District Court.
In this respect, it is no answer to say that the Court of Appeals appeared to find, although rather tentatively, that the state legislature had acted out of intentional denominational preferences. That court was no more entitled to supply the missing factual predicate for a different legal standard than is this Court. It is worth noting that none of the Court of Appeals’ judges on the panel in this case is a resident of Minnesota.
Second, apparently realizing its lack of competence to judge the purposes of the Minnesota Legislature other than by.the words it used, the Court disposes in a footnote of the State’s claim that the 50-percent rule is a neutral, secular criterion that has disparate impact among religious organizations. The limitation, it is said, “is not simply a facially neutral statute” but one that makes “explicit and deliberate distinctions between different religious organizations.” Ante, at 247, n. 23. The rule itself, however, names no churches or denominations that are entitled to or denied the exemption. It neither qualifies nor disqualifies a church based on the kind or variety of its religious belief. Some religions will qualify and some will not, but this depends on the source of their contributions, not on their brand of religion.
To say that the rule on its face represents an explicit and deliberate preference for some religious beliefs over others is not credible. The Court offers no support for this assertion other than to agree with the Court of Appeals that the limitation might burden the less well organized denominations. This conclusion, itself, is a product of assumption and speculation. It is contrary to what the State insists is readily evident from a list of those charitable organizations that have registered under the Act and of those that are exempt. It is claimed that both categories include not only well-estab*262lished, but also not so well-established, organizations. The Court appears to concede that the Minnesota law at issue does not constitute an establishment of religion merely because it has a disparate impact. An intentional preference must be expressed. To find that intention on the face of the provision at issue here seems to me to be patently wrong.
Third, I cannot join the Court’s easy rejection of the State’s submission that a valid secular purpose justifies basing the exemption on the percentage of external funding. Like the Court of Appeals, the majority accepts the prevention of fraudulent solicitation as a valid, even compelling, secular interest. Hence, charities, including religious organizations, may be required to register if the State chooses to insist. But here the State has excused those classes of charities it thought had adequate substitute safeguards or for some other reason had reduced the risk which is being guarded against. Among those exempted are various patriotic and fraternal organizations that depend only on their members for contributions. The Court of Appeals did not question the validity of this exemption because of the built-in safeguards of membership funding. The Court of Appeals, however, would not extend the same reasoning to permit the State to exempt religious organizations receiving more than half of their contributions from their members while denying exemption to those who rely on the public to a greater extent. This Court, preferring its own judgment of the realities of fundraising by religious organizations to that of the state legislature, also rejects the State’s submission that organizations depending on their members for more than half of their funds do not pose the same degree of danger as other religious organizations. In the course of doing so, the Court expressly disagrees with the notion that members in general can be relied upon to control their organizations.2
*263I do not share the Court’s view of our omniscience. The State has the same interest in requiring registration by organizations soliciting most of their funds from the public as it would have in requiring any charitable organization to register, including a religious organization, if it wants to solicit funds. And if the State determines that its interest in preventing fraud does not extend to those who do not raise a majority of their funds from the public, its interest in imposing the requirement on others is not thereby reduced in the least. Furthermore, as the State suggests, the legislature thought it made good sense, and the courts, including this one, should not so readily disagree.
Fourth, and finally, the Court agrees with the Court of Appeals and the District Court that the exemption must be extended to all religious organizations. The Court of Appeals noted that the exemption provision, so construed, could be said to prefer religious organizations over nonreligious organizations and hence amount to an establishment of religion. Nevertheless, the Court of Appeals did not further address the question, and the Court says nothing of it now. Arguably, however, there is a more evident secular reason for exempting religious organizations who rely on their members to a great extent than there is to exempt all religious organizations, including those who raise all or nearly all of their funds from the public.
Without an adequate factual basis, the majority concludes that the provision in question deliberately prefers some religious denominations to others. Without an adequate factual basis, it rejects the justifications offered by the State. It reaches its conclusions by applying a legal standard different from that considered by either of the courts below.
I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

 The Magistrate also recommended, and the District Court agreed, that all of the registration provisions applicable to religious organizations be enjoined as prior restraints offensive to the First Amendment. App. to Juris. Statement A-33. The Court of Appeals did not agree in this respect.

 This observation would appear to call into question the exemption of charitable organizations raising all of their funds from their members: since *263members cannot be relied upon to control their organization’s fundraising activities so as to prevent fraud, why should those organizations be entitled to an exemption when others are not?