US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday wrote in a dissent to a ruling by the nine-member court that the state of Maine cannot deny public funds to religious schools, arguing that the wall separating “church and state” is one of the US’ foundational principles.
“There is nothing neutral about Maine’s program,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in an opinion joined by five other justices.
“The state pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious,” Roberts wrote. “That is discrimination against religion.”
Photo: Reuters
In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote: “What a difference five years makes.”
“In 2017, I feared that the court was ‘leading us ... to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment,’” she wrote. “Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”
“With growing concern for where this Court will lead us next, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote.
Zachary Heiden, chief counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, said that the ruling upended two decades of jurisprudence.
“For over 20 years, every court that has heard a challenge to Maine’s law that prohibits public funding of religious education has upheld its constitutionality, but this Supreme Court has rendered a decision completely contrary to the founding principle of separation of church and state,” Heiden said.
Lia Epperson, a law professor at American University who joined an amicus brief in the case in support of Maine, said that the ruling was significant.
“This is the first time the court has explicitly required taxpayers to support something that is a specific religious activity — that is religious instruction,” Epperson said.
Steven Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, said that the decision was the latest by the Roberts court “on a long trajectory of expanding the roles of religion in public life.”
“The court has not changed the underlying law,” Schwinn said. “It hasn’t gone so far as to overrule prior cases and yet it nevertheless has moved inexorably in the direction of not only inviting religion more into public life, but really mandating religion more into public life.”
“It’s done that incrementally,” he said. “You can agree or disagree with the direction the court is taking, it seems to me, but that the court is taking a direction is undeniable.”
“If there was any question before there’s quite clearly a majority in favor of religion now,” Schwinn said.
Epperson agreed.
“We do have an increasingly religious and conservative court,” she said. “You will see that reflected in the decisions.”
“This is the most Catholic the Supreme Court has ever been in its history in terms of the justices,” she said.
Six of the nine justices are Catholic — Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer are Jewish, while Justice Neil Gorsuch is Episcopalian.
Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is to replace the retiring Breyer next term, is Protestant.
According to a Gallup survey, 22 percent of the US’ adult population identifies as Catholic and 45 percent as non-Catholic Christians.
Two percent identify as Jewish and 21 percent say they have no formal religious identity.
Kevin Welner, a professor specializing in educational policy and law at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that the Maine ruling could have some potential pitfalls.
“The example here is: Do we really want our government deciding which asserted religious beliefs are geniune?” he said.
An uncrewed Chinese spacecraft has acquired imagery data covering all of Mars, including visuals of its south pole, after circling the planet more than 1,300 times since early last year, state media reported yesterday. The Tianwen-1 successfully reached the Red Planet in February last year on the country’s inaugural mission there. A robotic rover has since been deployed on the surface as an orbiter surveyed the planet from space. Among the images taken from space were China’s first photographs of the Martian south pole, where almost all of the planet’s water resources are locked. In 2018, an orbiting probe operated by the European
QUARANTINE SHORTENED: A new protocol detailing risk levels and local policy responses would be ‘more scientific and accurate,’ a health agency spokesman said China’s revised COVID-19 guidelines, which cut a quarantine requirement in half for inbound travelers, also create a standardized policy for mass testing and lockdowns when cases of the disease flare, showing that the country still has a zero-tolerance approach to the virus. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) solidified the position during a trip to Wuhan, where the pathogen first emerged in 2019, saying that China is capable of achieving a “final victory” over the virus. The “zero COVID-19” policy is the most effective and economic approach for the country, Xi said during the trip on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported. The first
A former South Korean Navy SEAL turned YouTuber who risked jail time to leave Seoul and fight for Ukraine said it would have been a “crime” not to use his skills to help. Ken Rhee, a former special warfare officer, signed up at the Ukrainian embassy in Seoul the moment Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked for global volunteers and was fighting on the front lines near Kyiv by early March. To get there, he had to break South Korean law — Seoul banned its citizens from traveling to Ukraine, and Rhee, who was injured in a fall while leading a special operations
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii on Wednesday ended in failure due to a problem that occurred after ignition, the US Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has experienced stumbles. It did not provide details of what took place in the test, but said in an e-mailed statement that “the department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in
RSS