WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) – The Conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court has broken the wall separating church and state with a series of new rulings, eroding US legal traditions aimed at preventing that government officials promote any particular faith.
In three rulings over the past eight weeks, the court has ruled against government officials whose policies and actions were taken to avoid violating the prohibition of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on government approval of religion, known as the “establishment clause.”
The court on Monday supported a Washington state public high school football coach who was suspended by a local school district for refusing to stop making Christian prayers with players on the field after games . Read more
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On June 21, it backed taxpayer money paid by students to attend religious schools as part of a Maine enrollment assistance program in rural areas without nearby public high schools. Read more
On May 2, he spoke in favor of a Christian group that wanted to fly a flag adorned with a cross in Boston City Hall as part of a program to promote diversity and tolerance among the various communities in Boston. city. Read more
Conservative court judges, who have a 6-3 majority, in particular, have had a broad view of religious rights. They also issued a decision on Friday that was hailed by religious conservatives – which overturned the Roe v. Wade of 1973 that legalized abortion nationwide — although this case did not involve the establishment clause.
Cornell Law School professor Michael Dorf said most of the court seems skeptical of government decisions based on secularism.
“They view secularism, which for centuries has been the liberal world’s understanding of what it means to be neutral, as a form of discrimination against religion,” Dorf said of conservative judges.
In Monday’s ruling, Conservative Judge Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court’s goal was to prevent public officials from being hostile to religion while navigating the establishment clause. Gorsuch said that “in no world can a government entity’s concerns about phantom violations justify the actual violations of an individual’s First Amendment rights.” Read more
‘SEPARATION WALL’
It was President Thomas Jefferson who said in a 1802 letter that the establishment clause should represent a “wall of separation” between church and state. The provision prevents the government from establishing a state religion and prohibits it from favoring one faith over another.
In the three recent rulings, the court ruled that government actions aimed at maintaining a separation of church and state had violated separate rights to freedom of expression or the free exercise of religion also protected by the First Amendment.
But, as Liberal Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the Maine case, this approach “leads us to a place where the separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”
Opinions vary depending on the flexibility that government officials have to allow religious expression, whether by public employees, on public lands, or by people during an official procedure. Those who favor a strict separation of church and state are concerned that the Supreme Court’s historic precedents, including a 1962 ruling banning prayer in public schools, could be in jeopardy.
“It’s a whole new door that (the court) has opened up to what teachers, coaches and government employees can do when it comes to prosecuting children,” said Nick Little, legal director of the Center for Inquiry, a group which promotes secularism and science. .
Lori Windham, a lawyer for the Becket religious freedom legal group, said the court’s decisions will allow for greater religious expression of individuals without undermining the establishment clause.
“The separation of church and state continues in a way that protects church and state. It prevents government from interfering with churches, but it also protects various religious expressions,” Windham added.
Most religious rights rulings in recent years have involved Christian plaintiffs. But the court has also supported followers of other religions, including a Muslim woman in 2015 who was denied a retail job because she wore a headscarf on religious grounds and a Buddhist prisoner sentenced to death on 2019 who wanted a spiritual advisor present at his execution in 2019. Texas.
The court also sided with Christian and Jewish congregations on religious rights-based challenges to government restrictions, such as limits on public meetings imposed as public safety measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nicole Stelle Garnett, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who joined a brief filed with judges supporting the football coach, said the court only made it clear that governments should treat religious people in the same way as the others.
Following Monday’s ruling, many issues related to religious conduct in schools can be re-litigated under the court’s justification that the conduct must be “coercive” to raise establishment clause issues.
“Every classroom,” Garnett said, “is a courtroom.”
(For a related chart, click https://tmsnrt.rs/3njwtCD)
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Report by Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone
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Lawrence Hurley
Thomson Reuters
A Washington-based reporter covering legal matters focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a team project on how the defense of qualified immunity protects police officers accused of excessive force.