From Sandra Johnson
WASHINGTON: A school tuition voucher program in Maine must be allowed to pay for religious schools, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, further eroding restrictions on the use of government money for non-secular schools as justices ruled prohibiting them from receiving the funds violates the Constitution.
Justices ruled 5-4 that Maine’s tuition program, which allows parents to use state funds to pay tuition for private schools if their children for some reason can’t attend a public school locally, cannot legally block the funds from being used on religious schools.
The court ruled the state’s “nonsectarian” requirement—meaning a school can’t be religiously affiliated—violates the Constitution’s “free exercise” clause, which protects freedom of religion.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court that Maine’s law “promotes stricter separation of church and state than the Federal Constitution requires,” arguing that having a “neutral” program in which religious organizations receive public benefits “through the independent choices” of the families paying tuition doesn’t violate the Constitution.
Roberts cited two previous rulings the court has issued— Trinity Lutheran v. Comer and Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue—where the court struck down other similar state laws and ruled that states largely cannot “‘disqualify some private schools’ from funding ‘solely because they are religious,’” saying those rulings apply to this case.
In their dissents, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer noted this ruling goes even further than those previous cases by “requir[ing] states in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars” and forcing Maine to include religious schools, rather than only saying states “may” choose to do so.
The court split along ideological lines in the case, with conservative-leaning Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joining Roberts’ opinion and ruling Maine’s law should include religious schools, while left-leaning Justices Sotomayor, Breyer and Elena Kagan dissented.
