Jewish Groups Hail Supreme Court Decision in Playground Case

Jewish groups hailed a Supreme Court ruling on Monday that found that churches have the same right as other charitable groups to seek state money for new playground surfaces and other nonreligious needs.

The justices stopped short of saying whether the ruling applies to school voucher programs that use public funds to pay for private, religious schooling.

By a 7-2 vote, the justices sided with Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Missouri, which had sought a state grant to put a soft surface on its preschool playground.

Chief Justice John Roberts said for the court that the state violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by denying a public benefit to an otherwise eligible recipient solely on account of its religious status. He called it “odious to our Constitution” to exclude the church from the grant program, even though the consequences are only “a few extra scraped knees.”

“Today’s Supreme Court opinion in Trinity Lutheran is one of the most significant rulings on religious liberty in& many generations, and it bodes well for the future in providing a full measure of equality for American persons and institutions of faith,” Rabbi Abba Cohen, Agudath Israel’s vice president for federal affairs and Washington director, said in a statement:

Nathan Diament, executive director of Washington, D.C.’s Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, co-authored a “friend of the court” legal brief in the case.

“Today’s 7-2 ruling by the Supreme Court puts state aid to synagogues (and other houses of worship) and parochial schools for security and safety measures on an explicit and solid constitutional footing,” Diamond said in a statement. “The chief justice’s majority opinion makes it clear that a state may not exclude an institution from a neutral government benefit program because of the institution’s religious status. And Justice Breyer, in his concurring opinion, wrote that the state may not cut off a religious institution from ‘a general program designed to secure or to improve the health and safety of children’ without running afoul of the Constitution.”&

The case arose from an application the church submitted in 2012 to take part in Missouri’s scrap-tire grant program, which reimburses the cost of installing a rubberized playground surface made from recycled tires. The money comes from a fee paid by anyone who buys a new tire. The church’s application to resurface the playground for its preschool and daycare ranked fifth out of 44 applicants.

But the state’s Department of Natural Resources rejected the application, pointing to the part of the state constitution that says “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”

A recycled scrap tire is not religious, the church said in its Supreme Court brief. “It is wholly secular,” the church said.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor took the rare step of reading her dissent from the bench, saying the ruling weakens America’s longstanding commitment to separation of church and state.

“This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government — that is, between church and state,” she wrote, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “