II, §4, Art. In its application, the Center disclosed its status as a ministry of Trinity Lutheran Church and specified that the Center’s mission was “to provide a safe, clean, and attractive school facility in conjunction with an educational program structured to allow a child to grow spiritually, physically, socially, and cognitively.” App. squarely rejected by precedent”). Judge Gruender dissented. Missouri has decided that the unique status of houses of worship requires a special rule when it comes to public funds. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination. Critics of the bill raised the same themes as those in Virginia: that religion “needs not the power of rules to establish, but only to protect it”; that financial support of religion leads toward an establishment; and that laws for such support are “oppressive.” Curry 156, 157 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Copy of Petition [to General Assembly], Maryland Gazette, Mar.
Const., Art.
The Court today reaffirms that “denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that can be justified,” if at all, “only by a state interest ‘of the highest order.’ ” Ante, at 6. of Rights Art.
In his separate opinion concurring in the judgment, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that the First Amendment was clearly not meant to prevent religious organizations from accessing government-provided benefits such as police and fire services. The Church’s playground surface—like a Sunday School room’s walls or the sanctuary’s pews—are integrated with and integral to its religious mission. Neither do I see why the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause should care. Const., Art. In doing so, it made the same choice made by the earliest States centuries ago and many other States in the years since.
This test, explained the concurrence, ignored whether the public funds subsidize religion, the touchstone of establishment jurisprudence. It allowed the Federal Government to recover the grant’s value if a grantee violated this prohibition within twenty years of the grant. Gorsuch, J., filed an opinion concurring in part, in which Thomas, J., joined. The Court’s desire to avoid what it views as discrimination is understand- able.
The Religion Clauses of the First Amendment contain a promise from our government and a backstop that disables our government from breaking it. . As we said when considering Missouri’s same policy preference on a prior occasion, “the state interest asserted here—in achieving greater separation of church and State than is already ensured under the Establishment Clause of the Federal Constitution—is limited by the Free Exercise Clause.” Widmar, 454 U. S., at 276. Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, 582 U.S. ___ (2017), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a Missouri program that denied a grant to a religious school for playground resurfacing, while providing grants to similarly situated non-religious groups, violated the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. . For these reasons, reliance on the status-use distinction does not suffice for me to distinguish Locke v. Davey, 540 U. S. 712 (2004). . See, e.g., Everson, 330 U. S., at 14–15; Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U. S. 488, 492 (1961). 10 See Ala. of Orford, 55 N. H. 463, 468–469, n. (1875).
This case began in 2012 when the Church applied for funding to upgrade the playground’s pea gravel and grass surface through Missouri’s Scrap Tire Program, which provides grants for the purchase and installation of recycled tire material to resurface playgrounds. to Pet.
[3]:168[4] In 1876, the Blaine Amendment to the United States Constitution, which sought to combat the perceived threat Catholics posed to the nation’s Protestant character by prohibiting public funding of parochial schools, failed. See Letter from James R. Layton, Counsel for Respondent, to Scott S. Harris, Clerk of Court (Apr. This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state. (b) The Department’s policy expressly discriminates against otherwise eligible recipients by disqualifying them from a public benefit solely because of their religious character. The District Court held that the Free Exercise Clause did not require the State to make funds available under the Scrap Tire Program to Trinity Lutheran. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources offers state grants to help public and private schools, nonprofit daycare centers, and other nonprofit entities purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires.
In 2012, the Center sought to replace a large portion of the pea gravel with a pour-in-place rubber surface by participating in Missouri’s Scrap Tire Program. for Cert. Over and over, these arguments gained acceptance and led to the end of state laws exacting payment for the support of religion. It is that very status that implicates the interests protected by the Religion Clauses. 18, 2017) (adopting the position of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office that “there is no clearly effective barrier that would prevent the [Department] from reinstating [its] policy in the future”); Letter from David A. Cortman, Counsel for Petitioner, to Scott S. Harris, Clerk of Court (Apr.
See ante, at 12. The Establishment Clause does not allow Missouri to grant the Church’s funding request because the Church uses the Learning Center, including its playground, in conjunction with its religious mission. J. Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (1791), in The Sacred Rights of Conscience 337–339 (D. Dreisbach & M. Hall eds. Yet the Department offers nothing more than Missouri’s preference for skating as far as possible from religious establishment concerns. Mt. A straightforward reading of Article I, §7, prohibits funding only for “any church, sect, or denomination of religion, or in aid of any priest, preacher, minister or teacher thereof, as such.” The Missouri courts have not read the State’s Constitution to reach more broadly, to prohibit funding for other religiously affiliated institutions, or more broadly still, to prohibit the funding of religious believers. Lukumi, 508 U. S., at 546. NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
Const., Art. Thus, in McDaniel v. Paty, 435 U. S. 618, the Court struck down a Tennessee statute disqualifying ministers from serving as delegates to the State’s constitutional convention. [6] The state gave out fourteen such grants that year, and graded the church's application with the fifth highest score, but denied the grant, citing the 1875 provision requiring no state aid of churches. Seventh, §1 (1818), in id., at 537, 544–545; Del. Id., at 627–629. XI, §8 (1889), in id., at 2323; Neb. Missouri will fund a religious organization not “owned or controlled by a church,” if its “mission and activities are secular (separate from religion, not spiritual in) nature” and the funds “will be used for secular (separate from religion; not spiritual) purposes rather than for sectarian (denominational, devoted to a sect) purposes.” App. VII; Idaho Const., Art.
See, for now, School Dist. (Slip op. I agree with much of what the Court says and with its result. Justice Breyer, like the Court, thinks that “denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that can be justified only by a state interest of the highest order,” ante, at 6 (majority opinion) (internal quotation marks omitted). See T. Curry, The First Freedoms 19, 72–74, 76–77, 159–160 (1986) (Curry). The Court describes this as a constitutionally impermissible line based on religious “status” that requires strict scrutiny. In the face of the clear infringement on free exercise before the Court, that interest cannot qualify as compelling. Id., at 721, n. 4. Const., Art. II, §7 (1875), in id., at 2146–2147, 2192, 2230; Mont.
To hear the Court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground.
Nowhere is this rule more clearly implicated than when funds flow directly from the public treasury to a house of worship.2 A house of worship exists to foster and further religious exercise. McDaniel, 435 U. S., at 628 (internal quotation marks omitted). See Md. Const., Art. . Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer is a significant decision because it has the troubling implication of, as Justice Sotomayor states, taking public taxpayer money and giving it directly to a church – which endangers the separation of church and state.
Nor must a State require nonprofit religious entities to abstain from making employment decisions on the basis of religion. The stakes are higher. Community School Dist. . And the Establishment Clause erects the backstop. The government may not directly fund religious exercise. According to the Court, the State had “merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction.” Id., at 721. 1, 2, col.1 (“[W]hy should such as do not desire or make conscience of it, be forced by law”). The Church sought $20,000 for a $30,580 project to modernize the playground, part of its effort to gain state accreditation for the Learning Center as an early childhood education program.