Forty-four years later, Long and others connected to the Supreme Court case said seeing Louisiana pass a nearly identical law was like watching history repeat itself — and threatening the border between the Church and State for which they fought.
Louisiana is the first state to require the Ten Commandments in public schools since the Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling, and nine plaintiffs filed suit this week claiming the law violates parents’ rights. Louisiana’s governor has indicated he welcomes the challenge, and experts say it will test the new legal climate created by the conservative-leaning high court.
Long said it’s not surprising that this tension would resurface given the country’s political climate, but the answer lies in the Constitution, she added. “You want religion to be free from government, just like you want government to be free from religion,” Long said.
Others find that the problem returns exhausting. “My first reaction was: really? You are laughing at me. Open a history book,” Vivian Stone-Taylor told the Washington Post, whose grandmother was one of four plaintiffs in 1980. “This has already reached the Supreme Court. »
Like the lawsuit filed this week against Louisiana, the Kentucky suit represented a variety of religious and political backgrounds. There was Sydell Stone, a Unitarian housewife and activist; Bowers, an atheist and Republican precinct captain; Patricia Bricking, a Catholic public school teacher; and Martin Perley, a rabbi.
The four plaintiffs argued that the law was unconstitutional, flouting the separation between church and state. Supporters of the law, meanwhile, claimed the nation was founded on the ideals of the Ten Commandments, according to local media interviews at the time. (Supporters of the Louisiana law have made similar statements.)
Marvin Coan, who helped argue the case alongside William Stone, filed the lawsuit during his first year as general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. Neither he nor Stone, who could not be reached for comment, realized how far the case would go, he said.
Kentucky law required then-Superintendent of Public Instruction James Graham to ensure that the Ten Commandments were posted in all public classrooms. To avoid legal challenges, it stipulated that displays must be funded by donations, not taxpayers’ money, and required that a statement accompanying the display present the Ten Commandments as a “fundamental legal code of civilization.” Western and United States common law. (Louisiana law contains similar provisions.)
Coan and his team lost the case in Franklin County Circuit Court. They appealed, and the Kentucky Supreme Court also ruled in favor of the state. They took the case to the Supreme Court.
As the case moved through the courts, Stone-Taylor said her grandmother, Sydell Stone, began receiving routine accusations that she didn’t believe in God. (She certainly believed it, said Stone-Taylor, 52). Patricia Bricking faced the wrath of her devoutly Catholic relatives, who were angry with her for participating in public opposition, her daughter Elizabeth Bricking, 55, told the Post. Long said she remembers her mother testifying against the law at the state Capitol and nearly running off the road on the way back to Louisville.
The Supreme Court overturned the Kentucky decisions without hearing oral arguments in November 1980. The rare ruling showed how clear the law was on the issue, Coan said.
“These kinds of per curiam opinions and summary reversals are because enough members of the court believe the result is obvious in law and requires no further argument,” he said, adding : “There were a lot of very well-established opinions. The United States Supreme Court’s First Amendment rulings resulted in five of the court’s members declaring, “We don’t need to be told about this, we don’t need this to be debated.” »
After two years of family conversations about the law, Stone-Taylor said she remembers her grandmother calling her the day the Supreme Court decision was overturned. The decision didn’t surprise her grandmother, however, she said. “She knew they were right,” Stone-Taylor recalled.
Elizabeth Bricking, 12 at the time, had called in sick to stay home from school. A “Good Morning America” segment about their family and their involvement in the trial aired, and she couldn’t wait to see it. “I was thrilled to be in the news,” she laughed. “I pretended to be sick, because I don’t think I would have convinced our teachers to stop and watch this.”
After the Supreme Court’s decision was overturned, his family’s phone started ringing non-stop. Reporters were calling to talk to his mother, Bricking said, “so I was just taking all these messages.”
“We also received a few crazy calls,” she said. “Angry people insult us.”
Her mother came rushing home. “She said, ‘We won, we won!’ And it was really exciting,” Patricia Bricking said.
William Stone, the lead litigator in the case, told the Courier-Journal at the time that the ruling was a landmark for the decade.
“I think the court is sending a message that they are still here to protect the Constitution,” he said, according to the newspaper. “I think this will be one of the most important Supreme Court opinions of the 1980s.”
Kentucky law did not pass Lemon vs. Kurtzman test, which determines whether a law violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. To pass the Lemon test, a law must meet three criteria: it must have a secular objective; it must have an essentially secular effect; and it must not cause “excessive entanglement” between government and religion.
“Kentucky’s law couldn’t even pass on the first test,” Coan said. “What is the secular goal? There are not any. It is essentially religious in nature.
The “excessive entanglement” between government and religion is also evident, he added. “If the government demands that this be published, how much more entangled can you be?”
Coan said he expects the Louisiana law to meet the same fate.
But some legal experts said the country is now venturing into uncharted territory. Recent Supreme Court rulings have been more lenient toward religion in schools, such as in 2022, when the court ruled in favor of a Washington state football coach who kneeled in the middle from the field to pray and was joined by student-athletes.
“The Supreme Court has moved away from the decisions of the 1970s and 1980s,” said Steven Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego. In the Washington State football coach’s case, he made a decision “that was entirely improbable 20 or 30 years ago” by rejecting the Lemon test that determined the 1980 case, a he declared.
The court said it would instead follow “history and tradition,” Smith said. It is not yet clear what this means.
“At this point, it’s really uncertain where the court might go,” Smith said. “I don’t think people who are confident one way or the other would really be vindicated at this point.”
Still, Coan remains confident that the precedent set by Kentucky will endure.
“Maybe I’m in the minority. But I don’t think the court will go that way,” Coan said. “I am convinced that common sense will prevail.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
News Source : www.washingtonpost.com
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