PORTLAND, Maine (ABP) — Maine's highest court has turned away an attempt to force a state voucher program to include religious schools.
In a 6-1 ruling, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court said April 26 a state law that bans a publicly funded voucher program from including “sectarian” schools does not violate the United States Constitution.
The statute “neither improperly infringes on the free exercise of religion, nor violates the [First Amendment's] Establishment Clause,” said Justice Donald Alexander, who wrote the court's opinion.
Maine has a longstanding program allowing rural school districts lacking high schools to send students to neighboring school districts or, alternatively, to pay for their tuition at private schools. In 1981, state legislators amended the program to bar state funds from going to religious schools. At the time, they cited previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions suggesting such vouchers violated the First Amendment.
Several years later, a group of parents in those school districts sued the state, claiming the law discriminates against parents who want to send their children to parochial schools. While they lost that case, they re-filed it after the federal high court's 2002 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision. It said an Ohio voucher program that included religious schools was constitutional.
But, in the Maine court's most recent ruling, the majority cited a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision, 2004's Locke v. Davey. It said while states may provide tuition grants to religious schools, the Constitution does not compel them to as long as the state has a rational reason for excluding religious schools.
“With respect to the parents' claim of religious discrimination based on the Equal Protection Clause, the statute does not infringe upon the fundamental right to free exercise of religion in a constitutionally significant manner,” Alexander wrote.
But Justice Robert Clifford said his colleagues were overreading the Locke decision.
“I agree that the state is not required to provide tuition aid to parents who wish to send their children to non-public schools,” he wrote, in the lone dissent to the Maine decision. “If it does provide such aid, however, it should not be able to exclude private schools that also happen to have a religious affiliation. In my view, that is blatant discrimination that reflects not a neutrality toward religion, but rather an animus against religion.”
The case is Anderson v. Town of Durham.
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