Supreme Court Rejects Maine’s Ban on Aid to Religious Schools

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dominated on Tuesday that Maine might not exclude spiritual faculties from a state tuition program. The resolution, from a court docket that has grown exceptionally receptive to claims from spiritual individuals and teams in quite a lot of settings, was the most recent in a collection of rulings requiring the federal government to help spiritual establishments on the identical phrases as different personal organizations.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court docket’s three liberal justices in dissent.

The case, Carson v. Makin, No. 20-1088, arose from an uncommon program in Maine, which requires rural communities with out public secondary faculties to prepare for his or her younger residents’ educations in certainly one of two methods. They can signal contracts with close by public faculties, or they will pay tuition at a personal faculty chosen by mother and father as long as it’s, within the phrases of a state legislation, “a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Two households in Maine that ship or need to ship their kids to spiritual faculties challenged the legislation, saying it violated their proper to freely train their religion.

One of the faculties at difficulty within the case, Temple Academy in Waterville, Maine, says it expects its academics “to integrate biblical principles with their teaching in every subject” and teaches college students “to spread the word of Christianity.” The different, Bangor Christian Schools, says it seeks to develop “within each student a Christian worldview and Christian philosophy of life.”

The two faculties “candidly admit that they discriminate against homosexuals, individuals who are transgender and non-Christians,” Maine’s Supreme Court brief said.

The case was broadly comparable to one from Montana determined by the court docket in 2020, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. In that case, the court docket dominated that states should permit spiritual faculties to take part in applications that present scholarships to college students attending personal faculties.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for almost all within the Montana case, mentioned a provision of the state’s Constitution banning help to faculties run by church buildings ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s safety of the free train of faith by discriminating in opposition to spiritual individuals and faculties.

“A state need not subsidize private education,” the chief justice wrote. “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

But the Montana resolution turned on the faculties’ spiritual standing, not their curriculums. There could also be a distinction, Chief Justice Roberts mentioned, between an establishment’s spiritual identification and its conduct.

“We acknowledge the point,” he wrote, “but need not examine it here.”

The new case from Maine resolved that open query.

The Supreme Court has lengthy held that states might select to present help to spiritual faculties together with different personal faculties. The query within the circumstances from Montana and Maine was the other one: May states refuse to present such help whether it is made out there to different personal faculties?