Good News Club V. Milford Central School - Dissenting Opinions

Dissenting Opinions

For Justice Stevens, speech that embodied a religious purpose fell into three categories. One category included speech that approached a particular topic from a religious perspective. Another category included speech that "amounts to worship, or its equivalent." Between these two categories, Stevens posited a third category—religious proselytizing. This case, then, involved a government entity attempting to open its facilities to allow the first category of religious speech on its property but not the other two categories.

Distinguishing speech from a religious viewpoint, on the one hand, from religious proselytizing, on the other, is comparable to distinguishing meetings to discuss political issues from meetings whose principal purpose is to recruit new members to join a political organization. If a school decides to authorize afterschool discussions of current events in its classrooms, it may not exclude people from expressing their views simply because it dislikes their particular political opinions. But must it therefore allow organized political groups—for example, the Democratic Party, the Libertarian Party, or the Ku Klux Klan—to hold meetings, the principal purpose of which is not to discuss the current-events topic from their own unique point of view but rather to recruit others to join their respective groups? I think not. Such recruiting meetings may introduce divisiveness and tend to separate young children into cliques that undermine the school's educational mission. School officials may reasonably believe that evangelical meetings designed to convert children to a particular religious faith may pose the same risk.

Even if the Club's speech was not properly classified as religious worship, it certainly was religious proselytism, and the school was within its rights to exclude the Club from campus.

Justice Souter was more direct.

It is beyond question that Good News intends to use the public school premises not for the mere discussion of a subject from a particular, Christian point of view, but for an evangelical service of worship calling children to commit themselves in an act of Christian conversion. The majority avoids this reality only by resorting to the bland and general characterization of Good News's activity as 'teaching of morals and character, from a religious standpoint'. If the majority's statement ignores reality, as it surely does, then today's holding may be understood only in equally generic terms. Otherwise, indeed, this case would stand for the remarkable proposition that any public school opened for civic meetings must be opened for use as a church, synagogue, or mosque.

Souter also disputed that it was proper for the Court to reach the Establishment Clause claim. Neither the district court nor the Second Circuit had based their rulings on the Establishment Clause, because they had found no First Amendment violation stemming from Milford's actions. Consequently, the facts relating to the Establishment Clause claim were not as well developed as they otherwise might have been. Furthermore, Souter disagreed that this case was so similar to Widmar and Lamb's Chapel as the majority claimed. Widmar involved a university student group, one of over a hundred on campus, that used university space for religious worship. In that case, Souter pointed out, the risk of the university being seen as endorsing the worship was low in light of the number of student groups on campus and the level of maturity of the students. The film in Lamb's Chapel was open to the general public and aimed at adults, not children, and the school facilities had been used by a wide variety of private organizations, just as there were a large number of student groups in Widmar. The Good News Club, by contrast, began setting up its meetings almost half an hour before the school day ended and in a classroom adjacent to the third- and fourth-grade classroom, so that those students, at least, would see the Club every time it came to campus. In view of the state of the recorde, the "facts we know (or think we know) point away from the majority's conclusion, and while the consolation may be that nothing really gets resolved when the judicial process is so truncated, that is not much to recommend today's result."