Court Opinion

ID: 9425752
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:15:45.142063+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:57.357639
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
The case comes to us in an attractive posture, as the Act of Congress is in terms aimed to help “educationally deprived” children, whether they are in public or parochial schools, and I fear the judiciary has been seduced. But we must remember that “the propriety of a legislature’s purposes may not immunize from further scrutiny a law which either has a primary effect that advances religion, or which fosters excessive entangle-*430merits between Church and State.” Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, 413 U. S. 756, 774.
All education in essence is aimed to help children, whether bright or retarded. Schools do not exist— whether public or parochial — to keep teachers employed. Education is a skein with many threads — from classical Greek to Latin, to grammar, to philosophy, to science, to athletics, to religion. There might well be political motivation to use federal funds to make up deficits in any part of a school’s budget or to strengthen it by financing all or a part of any sector of educational activity.
There are some who think it constitutionally wise to do so; and others who think it is constitutionally permissible. But the First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In common understanding there is no surer way of “establishing” an institution than by financing it. That was true at the time of the adoption of the First Amendment. Madison, one of its foremost authors, fought the battle in Virginia where the per capita minimal levy on each person was no more than three pence. Yet if the State could finance a church at three pence per capita, the principle of “establishment” would be approved and there would be no limit to the amount of money the Government could add to church coffers. That was the teaching of his Remonstrance.1 As Mr. Justice Black stated it, “[n]o tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice *431religion.” Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 16.2
Parochial schools are adjuncts of the church established at a time when state governments were highly discriminatory against some sects by introducing religious training in the public schools. The tale has been told often;3 and there is no need to repeat it here. Parochial schools are tied to the proclamation and inculcation of a particular religious faith — sometimes Catholic, sometimes Presbyterian, sometimes Anglican, sometimes Lutheran, and so on.
The emanations from the Court’s opinion are, as suggested by Mr. Justice White, at war with our prior decisions. Federal financing of an apparently nonsectarian aspect of parochial school activities, if allowed, is not even a subtle evasion of First Amendment prohibitions. The parochial school is a unit; its budget is a unit; pouring in federal funds for what seems to be a nonsectarian phase of parochial school activities “establishes” the school so that in effect, if not in purpose, it becomes stronger financially and better able to proselytize its particular faith by having more funds left over for that objective. Allowing the State to finance the secular part of a sectarian school’s program “makes a grave constitutional decision turn merely on cost accounting and *432bookkeeping entries.” Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 641 (Douglas, J., concurring).
Nor could the program here be immunized from scrutiny under the Establishment Clause by portraying this aid as going to the children rather than to the sectarian schools. See Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, supra, at 781 et seq. That argument deserves no more weight in the Establishment Clause context than it received under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, with respect to which we summarily affirmed decisions striking down state schemes to circumvent the constitutional requirement of racial integration in public schools granting tuition aid to parents who sent their children to segregated private schools. Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Comm’n, 275 F. Supp. 833, aff’d, 389 U. S. 571, and 296 F. Supp. 686, aff’d, 393 U. S. 17. And see Griffin v. County School Board, 377 U. S. 218.
The present case is plainly not moot; a case or controversy exists; and it is clear that if the traditional First Amendment barriers are to be maintained, no program serving students in parochial schools could be designed under this Act — whether regular school hours are used, or after-school hours, or weekend hours. The plain truth is that under the First Amendment, as construed to this day, the Act is unconstitutional to the extent it supports sectarian schools, whether directly or through its students.
We should say so now, and save the endless hours and efforts which hopeful people will expend in an effort to constitutionalize what is impossible without a constitutional amendment.

 Madison’s Remonstrance is reprinted in the appendices to Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 63 (Rutledge, J., dissenting), and Walz v. Tax Comm’n, 397 U. S. 664, 719 (Douglas, J., dissenting).

 Everson was a 5-4 decision sustaining a state law which provided reimbursement to parents of children in sectarian schools for the cost of public bus transportation used by the students in traveling to school, but even the majority recognized that the law went to the “verge” of forbidden territory under the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment. 330 U. S., at 16. Although I was with the majority in that case, I have since expressed my doubts about the correctness of that decision, e. g., Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, 443; Wdz v. Tax Comm’n, supra, at 703.

 See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 628-629 (Douglas, J., concurring).