WASHINGTON (ABP) — A year after a New York City mother's appeal, the Supreme Court declined Feb. 20 to review a policy banning nativity scenes but allowing other holiday-season displays in the nation's largest public school district.
The justices declined, without comment or recorded dissent, to hear an appeal in Skoros v. City of New York (No. 06-271).
In the case, Catholic mother Andrea Skoros had asked the justices to overturn two rulings by lower federal courts that said the school district did not violate her two sons' religious freedom or her ability to raise her children without governmental religious interference when the district disallowed nativity scenes.
The schools' policy states: “The display of secular holiday symbol decorations is permitted. Such symbols include, but are not limited to, Christmas trees, menorahs, and the [Islamic] star and crescent.”
Shortly after implementing the policy in 2001, a group of Catholic activists asked school officials to allow crèches or nativity scenes to be included in the displays. However, the school board denied the request.
Skoros sued the city's public schools in 2002. In response to Skoros' lawsuit, city attorneys argued that menorahs, dreidels, Christmas trees, Santa Claus and the star and crescent are sufficiently secular to represent the holidays celebrated by students in the diverse district. However, they contended, crèches are purely Christian religious symbols.
Attorneys for Skoros, meanwhile, countered that school officials' interpretation of the policy unconstitutionally singled out Christianity for exclusion.
But both a federal district court and a divided three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the city.
“The principal effect of the … holiday-display policy and its interpretation is the advancement of its secular purpose,” the trial court found. “The holiday-display policy allows the presentation of symbols that, although perhaps religious in origin, have developed significant secular connotations. The symbols are used as teaching aids or resources to foster understanding and respect and are presented as part of a larger display of cultural symbols.”
Some conservative Christian activists had hoped the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case. It would have given the justices their first opportunity to render a decision on governmental religious displays since Justice Samuel Alito replaced retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. O'Connor generally ruled in opposition to governmental religious displays, while Alito's record as an appeals-court judge and previous legal posts suggest he may be open to a looser interpretation of the First Amendment's ban on government endorsement of religion.
The Skoros appeal was unusual in that the justices reviewed it several times in their conference meetings before deciding whether to hear the appeal. Some opponents of the New York policy hoped that meant the justices were struggling with whether to break new legal ground on a divisive cultural issue.
One church-state expert said that, while it is famously difficult to read anything into the Supreme Court declining to hear appeals, the delay may have owed to the case's ideological complexity.
“The people on the court who might have been most upset at the policy — the people who thought that this is discrimination against Christianity — they were in an impossible situation, because they are the same folks who believe we should leave to local government the decisions on these things,” said Chip Lupu, a professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington.
“This one was interesting because it cut across the conventional lines” on church-state issues, he said.
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