Court Opinion

ID: 9885544
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 13:07:14.811762+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:48:55.031401
License: Public Domain

Desmond, J.
(concurring). This is a mandamus-type proceeding (Civ. Prac. Act, art. 78) brought to compel the New York City Board of Education and the State Commissioner of Education, to discontinue and abolish the so-called “ released time program ” in the city’s public schools, on the alleged ground that the release of children from those schools, for one hour a week, at the request of parents, to attend outside religious instruction in their several faiths, violates the Federal Constitution as to its First Amendment, made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment. Specifically, it is the contention of petitioners tho£ the program as conducted in New York City, and the State statute and State and local regulations under which it operates, “ are violative of the TJ. S. Constitution within the principles set forth in the McCollum decision ” that is, Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Educ. (333 U. S. 203). I vote for affirmance, because I see no basis for any claim of unconstitutionality.
The First Amendment, which is not quoted at any place in the petition or in the briefs of petitioners and their supporters, forbids the making of laws “ respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ”. Neither of those prohibitions, in language or meaning, has anything whatever to do with this released time system. The McCollum case (supra), is not controlling on us here, since the Champaign, Illinois plan, there struck down as unconstitutional, differed from the New York program in a number of important respects, principally in that religious training took place in the classrooms of the Champaign public schools (one of the “ chief reasons ” for the decision, says Justice Jackson in a note in the Kunz v. New York dissent, 340 U. S. 290, 311), some public funds were spent in Champaign, the religious teachers there were chosen with the approval of the public school officials, and pupils were, in the Champaign school buildings, solicited for religious *176instruction. If we are to decide this case on precedent, we must follow our own decision in People ex rel. Lewis v. Graves (245 N. Y. 195), where we upheld, as against claims that it contravened both the Federal and State Constitutions, a released time plan identical with the one now before this court. It must be conceded, of course, that there are, scattered through the several lengthy opinions in McCollum, expressions which can be read to proscribe all released time programs, including this one. But stare decisis does not mean stare verbis, and until the New York plan, or one just like it, confronts the Supreme Court, there will be no precedent binding on us.
Before turning to a somewhat more thorough discussion oi the constitutional question, I mention another separate ground for affirmance. Petitioners are, according to the petition, the parents of pupils in New York City schools where this plan operates. Their children do not take part in the program but each receives religious instructions at religious schools, outside public school hours. It is indeed difficult to see how the release of other parents’ children impinges in any way at all, on any “ right ” of petitioners. True, they allege that the operation of the released time program “ inevitably results ” in coercion on parents and children to attend religious instruction, but it is clear that no such “ inevitable ” result has befallen petitioners or their children. The Lewis case (supra) in this court can, I suppose, be read as holding that these petitioners, as citizens, have standing to bring this mandamus proceeding, but I suggest the point will bear reinvestigation. It is farfetched to say that petitioners are aggrieved by the continuance of a program which has no effect on them or their children, and which does not involve the use of public buildings, property or funds.
I return to the alleged constitutional question, which needs must be one under the Federal Bill of Bights, since an extramural religious education project, just like this one, was expressly held, in the Lewis case (supra), not to be interdicted by our State Constitution (art. XI, § 4). Our duty then (unhampered by McCollum which is not controlling) is to lay the plain facts of this released time system over against the plain words of the First Amendment. The amendment, lavishly alluded to but seldom quoted, bans, in lucid, specific words, the making *177of any law ‘ ‘ respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ”. The New York released time setup is authorized by a statute (Education Law, § 3210), which permits absences from public schools “ for religious observance and education”, under rules to be established by the State Commissioner. In approving its passage, Grovernor Lehman, whose devotion to constitutional liberties needs no encomium, characterized as groundless the fears expressed by some that it ‘ ‘ violates principles of our government ’ ’ and stated: ‘ ‘ The bill does not introduce anything new into our public school system nor does it violate the principles of our public educational system ” (1940 Public Papers of Grovernor Lehman, p. 328). The regulations adopted by the State Education Commissioner, and by respondent New York City board (taking both sets of regulations together) excuse the absence from school, for one hour a week at the close of a daily session, of any pupil, whose absence is requested by his parent or guardian for attendance at, and, who does attend, a religious education course conducted under the control of one or more duly constituted religious bodies, each such pupil to be registered for the religious course with, and his attendance thereat reported to, the public school authorities, no announcement of any kind relative to the program to be made in the public school, but notification to come to parents from the religious organization only, no comment to be made by any principal or teacher of attendance or nonattendance of any pupil at the religion classes, and no responsibility for attendance thereat to be assumed by the public school but solely by the religious organizations, which, co-operating with parents, must file with the public school principal weekly, a statement of attendance at, or absence from the religion classes, of any pupil enrolled in the latter, with a statement of reasons for absences therefrom. Just where in all that is there “ an establishment of religion ” or a prohibition of “ the free exercise thereof ”? Characterization of such a program as “ divisive ” or “ oppressive ” or “ coercive ” is meaningless on a question of constitutional law. What petitioners are saying is that they dislike the whole enterprise, and consider it socially undesirable. Those are predilections, not questions of law.
*178The basic fundamental here at hazard is not, it should be made clear, any so-called (but nonexistent, as I shall try to show) “ principle ” of complete separation of religion from government. Such a total separation has never existed in America, and none was ever planned or considered by the founders. The true and real principle that calls for assertion here is that of the right of parents to control the education of their children, so long as they provide them with the State-mandated minimum of secular learning, and the right of parents to raise and instruct their children in any religion chosen by the parents (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510; Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390; Packer Collegiate Inst. v. University of State of N. Y., 298 N. Y. 184, 192). Those are true and absolute rights under natural law, antedating, and superior to, any human constitution or statute.
I cannot believe that the Chief Justice of the United States, in his opinion for the Supreme Court majority in Dennis v. United States (341 U. S. 494, 508), meant, literally, what he wrote: 11 that there are no absolutes ’ ’ and that “ all concepts are relative ”. Of course, even the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion are, to a degree, nonabsolute, since their disorderly or dangerous exercise may be forbidden by law. But embodied within “ freedom of religion ” is a right which is absolute and not subject to any governmental interference whatever. Absolute, I insist, is the right to practice one’s religion without hindrance, and that necessarily comprehends the right to teach that religion, or have it taught, to one’s children. That anything in the United States Constitution means, or could ever be tortured into meaning, that our basic law is violated by an arrangement whereby parents take their own children from the common schools, for one hour a week for instruction in their religion, is beyond my comprehension. As Dean Pound has lately reminded us, our American bills of rights “ in their significant provisions are bills of liberties ” (New Paths of the Law, p. 7). The New York released time system is a mere method for the exercise of the religious liberties of the parents of public school pupils, and infringes on no rights of anyone, since no one else’s rights are in any way affected-
*179By what process, then, in the teeth of those fundamentals, is an argument contrived for the proposition that this release of children from secular schools for religious education amounts to “an establishment of religion ” or prohibits the free exercise thereof? The answer is: the argument construes the First Amendment by ignoring its language, its history and its obvious meaning, and by substituting, for its plain wording, and intendment, the metaphor (Frankfurter, J., in the McCollum case, 333 U. S. 203, 231, supra) or loose colloquialism of “ a wall between church and State ”. That the “ wall ” has never been more than a figure of speech, is clear from the context in which it was first used by Jefferson (see as quoted by Justice Reed in the dissent in Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Educ., supra, p. 245, n.). Quite recently, the Supreme Court itself, in two of its careful opinions in the Dennis case (supra), has warned us against encasing truth in a “ semantic straitjacket ” (Chief Justice’s opinion, p. 508) or attempting to decide great constitutional issues by the use of a “ sonorous formula ” (concurring opinion of Justice Frankfurter, p. 519). To dispose of this ‘ ‘ unbreachable wall ” or “ impassable gulf ’ ’ idea, we need only apply here the simple, lucid test proposed by Justice Frankfurter in that same Dennis opinion: “ not what words did Madison and Franklin use, but what was in their minds which they conveyed?” (P. 523.) What was in the minds of the founders is writ as large and plain as anything on history’s pages, and there is not the slightest possible warrant for ascribing to them an intent to interfere (in the guise of a “ Bill of Rights ”!), with parents’ religious indoctrination of their own children.
One of the curiosities of history is the enlarged and distorted meaning currently being given, by some, to the simple phrase of the First Amendment: “ an establishment of religion ”. It must be the rule as to constitutions, just as to statutes, that there is “ no occasion for construction ” when the phrasing “ is entirely free from ambiguity ” (Wright v. United States, 302 U. S. 583, 589; 1 Cooley’s Const. Limitations [8th ed.], pp. 124-126; Matter of Carey v. Morton, 297 N. Y. 361, 366). The language of a constitution is to be given its ordinary meaning (Wright v. United States, and Matter of Carey v. Morton, *180supra). The fundamental purpose in construing it is to ascertain and give effect to the intent of the framers and of the people who adopted it, keeping in mind the objects sought to be accomplished and the evils sought to be prevented or remedied. Under any or all those rules and tests (and they are all one), what is the meaning of “ an establishment of religion ”? The Supreme Court itself gave us the answer in Cantwell v. Connecticut (310 U. S. 296, 303): “ it forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of worship.” “ Established ” churches were well known to the colonists, who had experienced them in Europe and America. They knew that the phrase meant “ a state church, such as for instance existed in Massachusetts for more than forty years after the adoption of the Constitution ” (Corwin, Constitution and What it Means Today [9th ed.], pp. 155-156). When the Constitution was adopted there were still established churches in five of the States, and a few years earlier there had been nine of them in the thirteen colonies (O’Neill, Religion and Education under the Constitution, p. 97). “ Establishment ” of a church or religion always and necessarily means an act of government favoring one particular church or group of churches. Historically, that is exactly what the amendment meant to the framers of the Constitution and to the Congress and the people who adopted it. Despite all the “ historical ” gloss, there is one only exposition in the Annals of Congress of the meaning, and no contemporary proofs to the contrary. Madison, the author, said during the First Congress (Annals of Congress for August 15, 1789, Vol. 1, p. 758) that the amendment mandated: ‘6 that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship Grod in any manner contrary to their conscience ”. The necessity for the amendment, he went on to say, was a fear by some that Congress might otherwise have power to ‘ ‘ make laws of such a nature as might infringe the rights of conscience, and establish a national religion ” and he repeated that the amendment was intended “ to prevent these effects ”. Finally, he noted that the amendment was being added because “ the people feared one sect might obtain a pre-eminence, or two combine together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform ”. Such fears had indeed been expres*181sed during the campaign to ratify the Constitution as originally drawn (see Van Doren, The Great Rehearsal, pp. 217, 237). No one at that time, or for years thereafter, so far as I can discover, ever attributed to the First Amendment any broader meaning. It is inconceivable that it was ever meant to prohibit governmental encouragement of, or cooperation with, religions generally. As Judge Story pointed out in his Commentaries (Vol. II [5th ed.], pp. 630-631) the “ general if not the universal sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement ”.
I realize that much broader scope may seem to have been accorded to the First Amendment, by the Supreme Court, in the Everson v. Board of Educ. (330 U. S. 1) and McCollum decisions. But if such a broadening was intended in McCollum and Everson (supra), it has, I say with respect, no basis in the only history which is pertinent: the history of the drafting and adoption of the amendment itself. Indeed, that seems to have been conceded by the Justices who were in the majority in the McCollum case (see Justice Frankfurter, concurring, pp. 217-220 of 333 U. S.). So experienced and proficient a modern commentator as Charles P. Curtis says, while approving the McCollum holding, that the court reached its decision without “ any justification whatever in what the Constitution says, and even less in what those who wrote it intended it to mean ” (Curtis, Modern Supreme Court, Vanderbilt L. Rev., Vol. 4, No. 3, p. 438). Indeed, Curtis surmises “ that the First Congress would have rephrased the First Amendment to exclude the release of school time for religious teaching, if it had then been one of the issues of the day.” The surmise is not a particularly daring one, as to those early Americans, nearly all of whose schools were religious in spirit and foundation, and who then, or just before or after, invoked the Deity in their Declaration of Independence, established chaplaincies, expressed their trust in God on their coins, and sang “ America ” part of which is a prayer to God to “ protect us by Thy might ”. The spirit of those times was that of Washington telling us in his Farewell Address that national morality cannot “ prevail in exclusion of religious principle ” and Edmund Burke, across the sea, warning that “ religion is the basis of civil society, and *182the source of all good and comfort ”. (Reflections on the Revolution in France.) Mr. Curtis says that Everson and McCollum, represent judicial work “ wise and well done ” but his reason for that personal judgment is that he thinks that ‘1 such a use of release time would have a bad effect on our public schools ” inculcating a feeling of separatism, etc. Perhaps so, but what has all that to do with the Constitution, and is it anything more than a disguised plea that the court be allowed to rewrite or amend the Constitution, to accomplish what seems, at the moment and to the incumbents, the better social policy?
Learned writers on law justify this sort of constitutional exegesis, and urge that “ a written constitution, which is frequently thought to give rigidity to a system, must prpvide flexibility if judicial supremacy is to be permitted ” (Levi, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning, p. 42). Rejected by them is the suggestion that “ the interpretation ought to remain fixed in order to permit the people through legislative machinery, such as the constitutional convention, or the amending process, to make a change ” (Levi, id.). The answer, says the same author, is that “ a written constitution must be enormously ambiguous in its general provisions ”. General and sweeping, yes. But not ambiguous. Being a constitution, it should state basic law in broadest outline, available for specific applications as needed. But it cannot, I suggest, be ambiguous and be at the same time a constitution. And, regardless of all this, a particular constitution may use definite, one-shot, one-meaning words, and when such are found, as we find them here in the First Amendment, no process of legal reasoning can make them mean something else, or serve some new and unintended purpose.
Petitioners, lacking support in precedent or history, fall back on assertions that this released time method gives religion “ active cooperation ” and “ aid in obtaining pupils ” for the off-campus religious classes. If proof of such co-operation, aid and encouragement could lead to a conclusion of law that the scheme is unconstitutional, then a trial of those allegations would be in order, and the dismissal of the petition below, without a trial, would be wrong. But governmental aid to, and *183encouragement of, religions generally, as distinguished from establishment or support of separate sects, has never been considered offensive to the American constitutional system. If they are inimical to our fundamental law, then every President has offended by invoking the Deity in his oath of office, by issuing Thanksgiving proclamations and calling on our people to pray for victory in war, or for peace, or for our soldiers’ safety. If petitioners are right, then there is a violation every time a chaplain opens a Congressional session with prayer, or an army bugler sounds “ Church call ”. If petitioners are right, then the Pilgrims were wrong, as was every President who officially urged our people to train themselves in, and practice, religion. Our own State Constitution, on petitioners’ theory, offends against American constitutionalism at the point in its preamble where it expresses gratitude “ to Almighty God ” for our freedom. Petitioners would have this court now deny the declarations of the Supreme Court in the Church of Holy Trinity v. United States case (143 U. S. 457) and of Chief Justice Kent in the People v. Ruggles case (8 Johns. 290) in 1811, that ours is a religious nation. I stand on Chief Justice Kent’s declaration, long ago in the Ruggles case (p. 296), that the Constitution “ never meant to withdraw religion in general, and with it the best sanctions of moral and social obligation, from all consideration and notice of the law.”
The order should be .affirmed, with costs.