U.S. Supreme Court examines religious school funding in major rights case

[January 22, 2020]  By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Supreme Court justices are poised to tackle a major religious rights case on Wednesday over whether states can bar public funding of religious institutions in a dispute over a Montana tax credit program that could benefit private religious schools.

The justices will hear about an hour of arguments in an appeal by three parents of students who attend a Christian school in Kalispell, Montana. They are challenging a lower court ruling that struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the state constitution's ban on government aid to religious schools and churches.

The ruling in the case, expected by the end of June, could narrow the separation of church and state.

Churches and Christian groups in the United States have pushed for years to expand access to public dollars for religious schools and places of worship, testing the limits of secularism in the United States.

Much of the litigation has involved attempts to create vouchers or other subsidies for private religious schools in states like Montana whose constitutions explicitly ban such funding. Republican President Donald Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is a prominent supporter of such "school choice" plans. The plaintiffs in the Montana case are backed by Trump's administration.

Critics of the programs have said they would siphon off scarce resources from public schools. These critics have said a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would require taxpayers to underwrite religious institutions - despite the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on government establishment of religion. They also said some of these religious institutions may discriminate against LGBT students or employees.

The Montana case gives the court, which has a 5-4 conservative majority, a chance to build on its major 2017 religious rights ruling in favor of a Missouri church that challenged its exclusion from state playground improvement grants generally available to other nonprofit groups.

The buliding of the U.S. Supreme Court is pictured in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 19, 2020. REUTERS/Will Dunham

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in that case that churches and other religious entities cannot be flatly denied public money even in states where constitutions explicitly ban such funding.

In the Montana case, three mothers of students at Stillwater Christian School sued in 2015, arguing that excluding religious school students from a scholarship program that helped pay tuition costs violated their rights under the U.S. Constitution to free exercise of religion and equal protection under the law.

A 2015 Montana law provided people a tax credit of up to $150 as an incentive for donations to groups that fund scholarships for private school tuition. The one such scholarship organization currently operating provides $500 payments to schools, primarily to help low-income students attend.

State tax officials limited the program to non-religious schools in order to comport with the state constitution, which forbids public aid to any "church, sect or denomination." Thirty-eight states have such constitutional provisions.

The Montana Supreme Court in 2018 struck down the scholarship program because it could be used to pay for religious schools - which most private schools are in Montana.

Montana said its no-aid provision protects religious freedom by preventing the government from gaining influence over religious schools and weakening public schools.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)

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