High Court Ruling on Upsurge in Church Suits

As religion pushes more vigorously into the social arena and opponents fight against it, a growing number of lawsuits work their way to the nation’s highest court, where many issues remain tangled.

The upsurge of such cases was reflected in the recently completed 1986-87 term of the U.S. Supreme Court, and still more are pending when it opens its new term in October.

Both jurists and church-state specialists note that such cases have multiplied steadily in the last two decades, the number in that period surpassing the total for the entire previous history of the nation.

Twelve such cases were handled by the court last term. In six, the court declined to review the decisions or let lower-court decisions stand, and in the another six, it handed down new rulings.

One Major Issue

“Separation of church and state was a big winner,” said Stan Hastey of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

Diverse interpretations of the constitutional caveat--either strict elimination of religion from the government sphere or neutral accommodation of it--are the nub of persistent, unsettled litigation.

In its latest term, the high court made these decisions:

- It unanimously upheld a challenged 15-year-old congressional law exempting religious organizations from complying with the Civil Rights Act’s ban on religious preferences in hiring practices.

Numerous religious bodies had filed friend-of-court briefs backing the right of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) to fire a former building engineer because he did not meet certain religious standards.

- The court by a 7-2 decision threw out a Louisiana law requiring public schools that taught evolution also to teach the “creation science” theory that life arose in abrupt stages.

The majority, without getting into the scientific basis for either view, held that the law’s purpose, as shown in the Legislature’s discussion of it, was to advance a theory favored in some religious circles.

Dissenting justices contended that the court shouldn’t judge the intent of legislators and said the scientific evidence offered for creation science justified schools’ inclusion of the abrupt-origins concept.

- The court, by an 8-1 majority, ruled that the state of Florida, by refusing unemployment benefits to Paula Hobbie, a Seventh-day Adventist fired by a Florida jewelry chain for refusing to work Friday evenings and Saturday (the Adventist Sabbath), violated “free exercise of religion.”

- The court ruled that Los Angeles airport commissioners had no constitutional authority to impose a blanket ban on religious activities inside Los Angeles International Airport.

Airport police had arrested a “Jews for Jesus” member for handing out literature.

- The court ruled that Jews qualified as a minority under an 1870 anti-discrimination law cited by a Silver Spring, Md., synagogue in a lawsuit against vandals who defaced the synagogue with Nazi swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti.

- In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that officials at Leesburg State Prison in New Jersey did not violate the rights of two Black Muslim inmates by denying them permission to attend a weekly Friday service as required by the Islamic faith.

The two had wanted to go inside the main prison building while on duty outside prison walls for the service, but the court’s slim majority held that religious freedom could be curtailed on a limited basis in the interest of maintaining security.

Among other cases, the court refused to consider a challenge to an Oregon law prohibiting public school teachers from wearing religious dress in class and let stand a lower-court ruling that Michigan could require teachers in religious schools to obtain state teaching certificates.

In its next term, the court has announced it will review at least four cases involving religion.

In a major one involving public schools, the court will consider whether state laws mandating observance of a “moment of silence” at the start of the school day violate the Constitution’s “no-establishment” clause. That clause says, “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, nor abridging the free exercise thereof.”