WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Supreme Court declined Nov. 27 to consider overturning a Maine state court's decision against the use of tuition vouchers at religious schools.
The justices' refusal to hear the appeal underscores their unwillingness — despite the court's conservative make-up — to force states to fund religious schools in the name of religious freedom.
The justices declined, without comment or recorded dissent, to hear an appeal of an April ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. That court said that state legislators acted constitutionally in 1983 when they excluded religious schools from a long-standing statewide voucher program. The program allows districts too small to have their own high schools to provide parents with vouchers to cover tuition at private schools.
A group of Maine parents, represented by the pro-voucher group Institute for Justice, sued for the right to include religious schools in the program. The plaintiffs argued that the legislature's decision to exclude religious schools from the program violated the First Amendment by discriminating against religion. But the state high court said legislators had a constitutionally permissible motivation for their action: to protect the separation of church and state.
In a landmark 2002 decision, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Ohio voucher program that included religious schools. A narrow majority of justices said such programs do not violate the First Amendment's ban on state support for religion as long as parents' choice to use the scholarships at religious schools is independent and is made amidst a wide array of options.
But, in 2004's Locke v. Davey decision, the court said that its previous ruling does not mean that states that offer voucher programs must include religious or private schools. In that ruling, the court upheld a Washington state policy excluding Bible colleges for ministerial training from a state scholarship program.
The Maine case is Anderson v. Durham School Department, No. 06-132.
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