Supreme Court Approves After-School Religious Clubs In Public Schools.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 June 11 that public schools may not exclude private religious groups from using classrooms for meetings immediately after the school day ends if those facilities are open to other community groups.

The high court's ruling in Good News Club v. Milford Central School does not overturn the existing precedents barring school-sponsored prayer and other religious activities but could open the door to evangelical groups seeking to proselytize to young children.

Americans United had filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court urging the justices to allow the school to bar the evangelical group. The day the decision was handed down, AU Executive Director Barry W. Lynn called it a mistake.

"The court's ruling means aggressive fundamentalist evangelists have a new way to proselytize school kids," Lynn said. "I can't imagine most parents will be happy about that. The only good news here is that safeguards remain in place to prohibit evangelism during the school day."

The case began in 1996 when the Rev. Stephen Fournier sought permission for his Good News Club to hold meetings at Milford Central School in Milford, N.Y., immediately after school hours. The adult-run club planned to use the facility for religious lessons and worship.

Good News Clubs are sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, a national group that seeks to convert young children to fundamentalist Christianity. At weekly meetings, children are divided into groups of "saved" and "unsaved." Children labeled "unsaved," who may be as young as 5 or 6, are pressured to make faith professions.

Despite this clear evangelical emphasis, the court majority held that the activity did not violate the separation of church and state because it was not school sponsored. Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the opinion for the majority, held that the school building was a public forum and that by barring the Good News Club, the school officials had violated the organization's free speech rights.

"[S]peech discussing otherwise permissible subjects cannot be excluded from a limited public forum on the ground that the subject is discussed from a religious viewpoint," Thomas wrote. "Thus, we conclude that Milford's exclusion of the Club from use of the school ... constitutes impermissible viewpoint discrimination."

Joining Thomas in the opinion were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer.

Justices David Souter, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. In his dissent, Souter accused the majority of overlooking the evangelistic nature of the Good News Club.

"It is beyond question that Good News intends to use the public school premises not for 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," Souter wrote. "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 church, synagogue or mosque."

The high court ruling does not mean that all public schools must allow evangelistic groups to use their facilities at the end of the school day. Schools may still ban all outside organizations or give them access only later in the day.

In other news about the Supreme Court:

* The justices on June 18 decided that they will not hear another appeal of an Alabama school prayer case brought by Americans United. AU won most of the issues presented in the case in the lower courts, but attorneys with the group said there was some troubling language in the decision by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that approves certain types of "student-initiated" prayer at public school settings.

AU had asked the Supreme Court to take the case to deal with that matter only, but the justices declined. (Chandler v. Siegelman)