NEWS STORY: Court Poised to Rule on Key Religion Case

c. 2000 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ Fifteen years after they first brought their case challenging government assistance to religious schools, Jefferson Parish, La., grandmothers Neva Helms and Marie Schneider should get a decision this week from the U.S. Supreme Court. “It’s taken a long time, and I’m excited that we’re finally about to get […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Fifteen years after they first brought their case challenging government assistance to religious schools, Jefferson Parish, La., grandmothers Neva Helms and Marie Schneider should get a decision this week from the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s taken a long time, and I’m excited that we’re finally about to get a decision,”Helms said from her home in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb. Her daughter, Amy, who was 13 when Helms brought the case to protest “resources being taken away from public schools,” turns 28 this week.


In the final days of its 1999-2000 term, the high court is expected to decide not only the Jefferson Parish case, which could affect both current and proposed government aid programs for religious schools, but also six other cases on hot-button issues such as abortion, the rights of criminal suspects, voting in open primaries and whether the Boy Scouts can ban gay leaders.

Court officials said opinions would be issued Monday and Wednesday, with some possibly held over until the weekend.

“Every year, they always seem to leave the biggest cases on the docket to the end, and that’s certainly true this year,” said Washington lawyer John Roberts Jr., a former law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

Few cases have gotten more scrutiny than the Jefferson Parish case, which has drawn an unusually high number of “friend of the court” briefs from more than 30 groups, ranging from the Knights of Columbus to New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration.

After a decade and a half, the case has been narrowed significantly to one simple question: Can the government provide computers and software to Jefferson Parish religious schools, most of them Roman Catholic?

The case has emerged as an important national watershed on the often emotional issue of how much assistance is too much in terms of the Constitution’s insistence on separation between church and state.

The consensus among legal experts seems to be that the court will do one of four things: Uphold at least major portions of the federal Title VI program, which provides equipment, including computers and software, to both public and private schools; rule, as the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did last year, that sending such equipment to religious schools violates the Constitution’s separation of church and state; or declare, as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops advocate, an equity doctrine in which religion would no longer be a factor in doling out federal aid.


The fourth option would keep the case alive by returning it to the lower courts to determine whether the computers provided to Jefferson parochial schools are used for religious purposes.

“The court has been all over the map on these issues, so predictions are difficult,” said Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law expert at American University in Washington, D.C.

Still, Raskin and most constitutional experts think the high court, most likely by a 5-4 or 6-3 vote, will take a middle-ground approach, allowing computers to be provided as long as they aren’t used for religious purposes.

During oral arguments in December, the nine justices seemed genuinely pained as they weighed modern implications of the First Amendment’s establishment clause: “Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion.”

In previous cases, the justices have allowed the government to provide religious school students with textbooks, bus transportation consistent with routes already provided for public school students and remedial and special education instruction.

But what about computers, which attorneys for Helms and Schneider maintain are different because they can be used for both religious and nonreligious purposes?


“It’s a hard line to draw,” Justice John Paul Stevens said while exploring what kind of aid is constitutionally permissible. Justice David Souter said justices are “groping” for ways to identify “forms of aid that run the risk of helping … inculcate religious beliefs.”

During the oral arguments, attorney Michael McConnell, representing seven Jefferson Parish Catholic school parents, argued that religious school students are entitled to the same equipment and materials provided public school students.

The government assistance program for parochial schools “is not a constitutional threat,” McConnell said. Rather, it “leaves people free to make educational choices themselves.”

But Lee Boothby, an attorney representing Helms and Schneider, said that unlike textbooks, which generally are provided directly to students, computers usually are given directly to schools and therefore represent the kind of “direct aid” to religious institutions that should be barred.

Both sides on the contentious issue of school vouchers _ financial aid to help poor parents defray the cost of private (including religious) school tuition _ will be watching to see what signals the court sends with its decision.

Jonathan Entin, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, a city experimenting with vouchers, doesn’t expect much guidance.


“I’m not entirely sure how much it is going to tell us about vouchers beyond what we already know _ that the court is pretty divided on church-state issues in general,” Entin said.

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The Supreme Court also will release decisions this week in other major cases.

In what amounts to its first major decision on abortion in eight years, the high court is expected to decide whether a Nebraska ban on a form of late-term abortion should be sustained. The court’s decision likely will affect similar laws in 29 other states where a ban on what opponents call “partial-birth” abortion has been stayed, pending further court review. In the procedure, known medically as dilation and extraction, the fetus is pulled through the birth canal before the skull is punctured and collapsed.

The court also will decide whether exemptions should be allowed to its 1966 landmark decision that suspects in custody must be informed that they have the right to remain silent, that anything they say may be used against them and that they have the right to counsel. Several local police departments said they would continue to issue the “Miranda warning” regardless of how the Supreme Court decides the issue.

Another case generating both national and local interest raises the question of whether the Boy Scouts can bar gay men from serving as troop leaders. The New Jersey Supreme Court said Boy Scouts officials were guilty of discrimination when they removed James Dale as a Scout leader after learning he is gay. The Boys Scouts says it has the right to freedom of association.

(Embargoed for use in Sunday AM’s)

DEA END RNS

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