Court rules church can apply for state funds

7-2 decision seen by some as challenge to separation of church and state.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state governments cannot prevent public money from being used by churches for use in a non-religious purpose.

By a vote of 7-2 Monday, the justices concluded that Trinity Lutheran Church in Missouri could apply for state dollars to pay for installing a rubber playground surface considered to be safer than ordinary playgrounds.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “the exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution all the same, and cannot stand.”

Justices Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, Anthony Kennedy, Neil Gorsuch, Stephen Breyer, and Clarence Thomas joined Roberts to form the majority. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Ohio does not have a ban similar to Missouri.

In her dissent, Sotomayor write that “to hear the court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground. The stakes are higher. This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state.”

“The court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church,” she wrote. “Its decision slights both our precedents and our history, and its reasoning weakens this country’s longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both.”

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