PERSPECTIVE ON SCHOOL VOUCHERS : Returning Us to Our Religious Roots : Prop. 174 would align California with advanced nations that provide free exercise of religion and education.

Once again, the eyes of the nation are on California, the state where the future arrives early. Fifteen years ago, the issue was Proposition 13; this time it is education vouchers. Both raise national questions that reflect deep divisions in the body politic.

Just as Proposition 13 was a property-tax revolt, Proposition 174 is a public-school revolt. With Proposition 174, the voters will declare themselves: Should public funds be available for children to attend religious schools? That’s the heart of the matter. Although all private schools will be eligible, 85% of them are religious. A fateful decision, to be sure, but not so novel as it at first might seem.

If Proposition 174 is enacted, it will simply return us to our roots. For the first 150 years of the republic, funding religious schools was presumptively constitutional. That’s why more than 30 states enacted Blaine amendments (California Constitution, Article IX, Section 8) to do at the state level what the U.S. Constitution did not: prohibit aid to religious schools. Indeed, not until 1962 did the U.S. Supreme Court strike down school prayer (though, as American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker wryly notes, so long as there are math tests, students will continue to pray in school).

Perhaps more to the point, Proposition 174 would place California in the community of free nations that provide for the free exercise of religion and education as a matter of course. The United States is the only advanced democracy that does not provide public funding for religious schools. Almost without exception, even the former Iron Curtain countries now fund religious education, a reaction to decades of communist indoctrination.

Australia is a case in point, because its constitution draws heavily on ours, including a nearly verbatim rendering of our First Amendment, which requires separation of church and state and guarantees the free exercise of religion.

Since 1971, with the Lemon vs. Kurtzman case, the Supreme Court has emphasized the “separation” clause, refusing to let public funds flow to religious schools. (The Lemon precedent sets out a three-part test for determining when a government practice amounts to an unconstitutional establishment of religion; conservative justices have long criticized the precedent.) By way of contrast, the Australian high court emphasizes the “free exercise” clause, and permits public funds to flow to any school, public or private, religious or secular, so long as the state is neutral and treats all religions--including “irreligion”--equally.

This is precisely what we do with health care and other social programs--babies can be born at public expense in a Catholic hospital, patients can be treated in Jewish, Methodist and Seventh-Day Adventist hospitals, the dead can be interred in hallowed ground at public expense; soldiers have access to chaplains (as do members of Congress, whose proceedings open with prayer); our coins proclaim “In God we trust” and the pledge to the flag refers to “one nation, under God.”

In some limited cases, public funds can be used in “association” with religious schools: for crossing guards, books and, in some jurisdictions, school buses. But the line is fuzzy. As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) tartly observes, school books are constitutional, maps are not; what, then, of atlases?

But make no mistake. Poor youngsters who prefer a religious education are the nation’s last unprotected minority; required by law to attend school, they have no choice--in America--but to attend a government school. In no other democracy are children so treated.

The foreword to “Separation of Church and Child,” a short book on this subject by Bruce Cooper and Tom Vitullo-Martin, describes the case of an American Indian child, Little Bird of the Snow, who is denied welfare benefits because her parents will not register her for a Social Security number, for religious reasons. Her father sued. The court ruled that the state cannot deny Little Bird a public benefit to which she is otherwise entitled because of her religious beliefs. Yet this is precisely what happens to youngsters too poor to attend a religious school. Proposition 174 would end this. It is a matter of simple justice.

Aid to religious schools is part of an old argument in America, but it is specially important today because of a significant shift in the U.S. Supreme Court. Unalterably opposed to aid to religious schools for 40 years, today’s court is much more likely to find a voucher system constitutional. As Moynihan reminds us, that is the court’s most enduring practice: to reverse itself.

Finally, as everyone knows, we are witnessing a danse macabre in our cities, a downward spiral of crime and violence among young people that cries out for a moral and ethical response, precisely the role religious schools play best. Denying poor citizens access to these schools not only discriminates against them; it flies in the face of common sense.