Religion & the Court
Gaffney, Edward McGlynn Jr.
T he Supreme Court has opened its doors for an-other term and has on its docket an important case involving the First Amendment's religion clause. Mitchell v. Helms will be heard on December 1, and...
...The drawing of a constitutional line between books and maps led Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y...
...Berkeley law professor Jesse Choper calls this area of the Court's work "ad hoc judgments which are incapable of being reconciled on any principled basis...
...Second, computers and books are functionally equivalent as alternative means of transmitting texts...
...Commonweal IO November 5,1999...
...to wonder famously what the Court might opine about an atlas...
...Alas, the Court's First Amendment precedents touching on religion have, until fairly recently, been in disarray...
...In the latest effort to speak to this issue, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor explained in 1997 that there is no impermissible financial incentive to advance religion when "aid is allocated on the basis of neutral, secular criteria that neither favor nor disfavor religion, and is made available to both religious and secular beneficiaries on a nondiscriminatory basis...
...If all the Court had to do was to reach back to clear precedents to resolve Mitchell, it would be easy to predict the outcome...
...The case involves a popular federal program providing assistance to state and local educational agencies to purchase and lend nonideological materials such as computers to public and nonpublic schools...
...Mitchell v. Helms will be heard on December 1, and the Court will rule on it next spring...
...However, in another case the Court ruled that it is impermissible to lend instructional items such as tape recorders and maps...
...For example, the Court ruled that it is permissible for the government to provide books to students attending religious schools...
...Third, important long-term economic benefits flow from training in computer skills...
...The Mitchell case affords the Court an opportunity to apply the nondis-crimination principle to the specific question of providing computers to all students, in public and private schools, including religious schools...
...The denial of a nonideological benefit like computers could thus be viewed as a penalty on the exercise of parental liberty to choose a religious school for their children, which the Court protected as early as 1925...
...A group of taxpayers has challenged the program as impermissible because it advances religion in violation of the prohibition of an establishment of religion...
...Educators in religious schools have filed a brief offering three reasons to uphold the federal program...
...In recent decisions, though, the Court has been inching toward greater clarity and consistency...
...First, computers are an effective tool to enable students to undertake research and to write more cogently and effectively...
Vol. 126 • November 1999 • No. 19
