Winning Back the Ethnics: Public Help for Private Schools
Peters, Charles
Winning Back the Ethnics: Public Help for Private Schools by Charles Peters One of the main concerns of many liberals these days is how to win back their old political allies, the...
...there are no strings on how the salary money is to be spent, but the tuition money must go for education...
...Furthermore, the Chief Justice argued, the sort of aid given (i...
...Another Busing Case The leading Supreme Court case on the religious-establishment clause, Everson v Board of Education decided in 1947, shows the Court has at least partially grasped this point...
...From these statements, it seems clear that neither Madison nor Jefferson would approve of the government’s bribing its citizens to be religious by giving aid to sectarian schools only...
...In this interpretation, no appropriation that aided religion was acceptable, even if denying the help to a sectarian group would mean discriminating against religion...
...It may seem naive to believe that legal reasoning can persuade people to abandon long-standing prejudices...
...In the case of the Burger brand of anti-Catholicism, it may be, but I think the liberal branch is so ready for collapse that the right pinprick might do the job...
...The issue in the case was whether New Jersey could finance bus transportation for students in public and Catholic schools...
...The purpose of the First Amendment’s religion provisions-the free exercise and establishment clause-is to keep government from doing anything that influences men’s opinions in the realm of religion...
...Where such aid, direct or indirect, is part of a program of aid for public and private schools generally, denying it to Catholic schools seems to be exactly what the First Amendment forbids...
...So in two 1971 decisions, Lemon v Kurtzman and Robinson v DiCenso, the Court rejected programs of government aid for parochial elementary and secondary schools...
...Bribing the Devout If a church catches fire, putting out the fire will aid religion...
...If religious schools and buildings are denied the fire protection and financial assistance government gives to all other schools and buildings, then the government is hampering the free exercise of religion...
...If this is unconstitutional, then would it not also be unconstitutional for a government employee to give any part of his salary to his church...
...In fact, it was Columbia...
...And that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forebearance, love, and charity toward each other...
...Justice Hugo Black, for the majority, wrote: New Jersey cannot consistently with the “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment contribute tax-raised funds to the support of an institution which teaches the tenets and faith of any church...
...There are sensible reasons for arguing that public money should be used only for public schools...
...But is this enough to make it unconstitutional...
...Under the G. I. Bill, the government offered to pay my tuition at the college of my choice...
...Religion is being discriminated against...
...While the Supreme Court has never confronted the question because of its rules barring certain types of suits in federal courts, the ACLU and most state courts that have considered similar issues would answer “yes...
...Allard Lowenstein was haunted by the private-school issue during his congressional campaign last year in Brooklyn...
...On the other hand, other language of the amendment commands that New Jersey cannot hamper its citizens in the free exercise of their own religion...
...Of course, you can argue that the salary is paid for services performed under contract, while the tuition is a gift...
...it is because it is property . . . . Neither the fireman nor the policeman has to ask before he renders aid, “Is this man or building identified with the Catholic Church...
...There are signs now that the old democratic dream of the public school, at least insofar as the mixing of social and economic classes is concerned, is now realized only outside the large cities...
...One might see in this stand, then, an admirable loyalty to principle in unfavorable political weather, a noble decision to risk his personal success rather than compromise the First Amendment...
...The G. I. Bill, under which I went to college after World War I1 and which is not dissimilar to current proposals for educational vouchers, illustrates why Professor Morgan thinks the ACLU view is bad law...
...it is because he is a man and a member of our society, The fireman protects the Church school-but not because it is a Church school...
...I get the free textbooks as long as I’m not Catholic...
...But before these school authorities draw a check to reimburse for a student’s fare they must ask just that question, and if the school is a Catholic one, they may render aid because it is such, while if it is of any other faith or is run for profit, the help must be withheld...
...Rutledge wrote that the “problem...
...He opposed aid to Catholic schools (a stand which was wellpublicized by his opponent) and lost -largely through a failure to capture the white ethnic vote...
...and therefore that no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with peculiar emoluments or privileges...
...child forced by conscience” to attend such schools, “it does not make the state unneutral to withhold what the Constitution forbids it to give...
...Justice Black said the Court had not taken up the point that the program denied aid to other private schools because the case had not been argued on those grounds...
...Charles Peters is editor of The Washington Monthly...
...We must be careful, in protecting the citizens of New Jersey against state-established churches, to be sure that we do not inadvertently prohibit New Jersey from extending its general state law benefits to all its citizens without regard to their religious belief...
...influence a person to go or to remain away from church” and that “state power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions than it is to favor them...
...Black also wrote that neither the state nor the federal government “can...
...Winning Back the Ethnics: Public Help for Private Schools by Charles Peters One of the main concerns of many liberals these days is how to win back their old political allies, the white ethnics...
...Richard Morgan...
...Indeed, as in so many other cases, the right question for the liberal to ask himself is not whether he should compromise, but whether his principle is wrong...
...Thus any deviation from this view would mean compromising on an issue of principle, something any good liberal abhors...
...The Pope Johns, the John Kennedys, the Father Hesburghs and Berrigans have already done a lot to deflate liberal anti-Catholicism...
...nor subjected to any penalties or disabilities unless under color of religion, any man disturb the peace, the happiness, or safety of society...
...The heart of the religion provisions of the First Amendment was the Founding Fathers’ belief that government should not influence a man to be religious or not-to be a Catholic Or not to be a Catholic...
...veteran’s bonus would be unconstitutional to the extent the veteran contributed it to religion...
...He, no doubt, did see it this way...
...Nor would they approve of government’s bribing its citizens not to be religious by giving aid to all but sectarian schools...
...While my own son attends public school in Washington and I have always been an advocate of public education, I do not believe the First Amendment forbids government aid to sectarian schools when the money comes as part of an aid program for public and private schools generally...
...In other words, Catholic schools had been singled out for special aid that other private schools could not get...
...e., buildings) was not likely to involve governmental agents in close and continuing monitoring of the work of recipient institutions...
...Xavier of Newark while ignoring Jersey City Prep...
...Professor Morgan is troubled by the fact that such a general aid program would help Exeter as well as the little parochial school around the corner...
...Ironically, in the large cities it is only the parochial schools that offer a reasonable mixture of the classes...
...The Court upheld the system...
...that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it...
...because they couldn’t get G. I. benefits if they went to Sectarian U.-and the place would have burned down anyway...
...Rather, the dissent (written by Justice Wiley Rutledge and concurred in by Justices Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Harold Burton) arose from a fundamentalist view of the religiousestablishment clause...
...This view, which is essentially the same as that of the ACLU and most state courts, strikes me as absurd...
...But the choice for Lowenstein, as for all the other good liberals who have taken similar “principled” stands, is not between steadfast adherence to the Constitution and compromise with political realities, the familiar split between purists and pragmatists...
...But it could have been Notre Dame...
...Had the government’s money been paid to Notre Dame, either through me or directly, the effect of the transaction would have been to aid religion...
...I am not...
...Consequently, it cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Non-Believers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public-welfare legislation...
...The crucial point of Burger,” Professor Morgan writes, “was...
...In other words, government cannot (beyond what is necessary for the preservation of peace and order) act toward religion in any way that might influence men’s attitudes towards practicing or not practicing it...
...My Favorite Mason But Justice Burger isn’t about to let government help those nuns brainwash little children...
...Free Press, $7.95...
...He then added that such an objection would I have to be based on the Fourteenth Amendment and its equal-protection I clause...
...So, even if the buses had run to all the schools in the state, the minority would have found it unconstitutional if it stopped at a single religious school...
...cannot be cast in terms of legal discrimination or its absence,” and that, while withholding aid from sectarian schools “may hamper the...
...The minority was not, however, entirely blind to the discrimination issue...
...James Madison, in preparing a similar statement which he tried to incorporate into the Virginia Declaration of Rights, wrote : That religion or the duty we owe to our creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of conscience...
...Thus Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his dissenting opinion : The basic fallacy in the Court’s reasoning . . . is in ignoring the essentially religious test by which the beneficiaries of the expenditure are selected...
...The Tilton case upheld federal building grants to four Catholic colleges as part of a program of*similar grants to private and public colleges throughout the country...
...The old prejudice was based on a fear of Catholic absolutism, which in these days of raging doctrinal debate within the Church and of increasing regard for cultural diversity among liberals, seems hardly the ogre it once was...
...Yet, many of these same liberals oppose government aid to Catholic schools, which is among the more vitally felt needs of a very large number of the white ethnics...
...The Everson decision was, however, not exactly an ideal test case, since New Jersey’s bus system would not have given aid to non-Catholic private schools...
...Colleges Are Different The minority in the Everson case did not, however, choose this ground for objecting to the system...
...that therefore, the proscribing of any citizen as unworthy of the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right...
...In his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom Thomas Jefferson wrote : Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...
...Such aid is usually opposed on the ground that it is unconstitutional, that it violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against an establishment of religion...
...This showed that he had not i quite grasped the point, for there was a simpler reason available: the First Amendment itself, by forbidding the government to single out religion for help or harm, raises objections to a program that helped St...
...But it’s about time we took the sanctimony of constitutional principle out of the argument, because as the big city public school systems collapse of their own bureaucratic weight, the argument becomes increasingly important, and desperately needs to be pursued rationally...
...In 1971 the Burger Court, in Tilton v Richardson, seemed to acknowledge some of the position’s absurdity, at least as it applies to colleges...
...This purpose can be accomplished only by forbidding government to single out religion for help or harm...
...Veterans who want to go to Sectarian U. would have to attend Agnostic Tech...
...His anti-Catholicism is in the tradition of the smalltown Mason rather than the liberal intellectual and probably has less need to disguise itself...
...Thus, according to Justice Rutledge and the Everson minority, the religious provisions-which our forefathers put in the First Amendment to keep government from influencing its citizens in matters of religiondemand that government influence a student not to attend a sectarian school...
...A policeman protects a Catholic of course-but not because he is a Catholic...
...In his new book, The Supreme Court and Religion, Richard E. Morgan,* a teacher of government at Bowdoin College, says, “I believe the conventional liberal positions on the religion clause (as reflected, let us say, by the ACLU) are obsolescent-that they no longer serve the liberal goal of diversity and individualism consistent with a decently ordered government and society...
...College students were less ‘impressionable’ than younger persons, and institutions of higher learning (even though they might have ties to religious organizations) were not characteristically so devoted as parochial primary and secondary schools to propagating the faith...
...And if the fact that there is a restriction on how the money is to be used is enough to make it unconstitutional, using public money for a fire department would also be unconstitutional to the extent the fire department used it to protect sectarian property...
...But if government refuses to put out the fire, it will be denying church property the protection it gives all other property...
...The degree of entanglement was not sufficient to require disallowal on establishment clause grounds...
...But, if the fact that the scholarship is a gift would make its use at a Catholic school unconstitutional, a *The Supreme Court and Religion...
...the distinction between institutions of higher learning and parochial elementary and secondary schools...
Vol. 4 • January 1973 • No. 11
