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Zorach
v. Clauson
343
U.S. 306 (1952)
The
Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons Religious Institutions
Group gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center which provided the following case commentary taken from Terry Eastland, Religious
Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define
the Debate over Church and State (1993).
Four
years after McCollum v. Board of Education (1948),
the Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of another
"released time" program for public school students, this
one in New York City. Taxpayers and residents whose children
attended the city's public schools contended that the program
was in essence not different from the one struck down in
McCollum, even though in New York (unlike Illinois)
the religious instruction was provided off campus, not on
public school premises. This fact impressed Justice William
O. Douglas, who wrote for the Court in affirming the judgment
of the New York Court of Appeals that the released-time
program was indeed constitutional.
Justice
Douglas, who had voted with the majority in both Everson
v. Board of Education (1947) and McCollum, declared
that the First Amendment prohibitions are absolute "within
the scope of [their] coverage" but that they do not command
a "separation of church and state" in "every and all respects."
His opinion included a sentence destined to become one of
the most often cited from the Court's religion-clause cases:
"We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose
a Supreme Being."
Douglas's
permissive or "accommodationist" view of the no-establishment
provision, which he later recanted, did not satisfy Justices
Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson, all three
of whom filed strong dissents Black, author of the Court's
opinions in Everson and McCollum, said that
while the New York City program did not make use of public
school rooms for religious instruction, it nonetheless did
employ "the State's compulsory public school machinery."
Justices Frankfurter and Jackson saw the case in a similar
light. For all the dissenters, the case turned on what they
regarded as the released-time program's coercive nature.
All four opinions are presented below, as are editorial
responses to the decision from The Christian Century,
the New York Times, and Commonweal.
Participating
in Zorach v. Clauson, decided April 28, 1952, were
Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson and Associate Justices Hugo
L. Black, Harold H. Burton, Tom C. Clark, William O. Douglas,
Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Sherman Minton, and
Stanley F. Reed
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