wfn.org | Supreme Court affirms religious club's use of school

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

June 12, 2001	News media contact: Joretta Purdue·(202)546-8722·Washington
10-21-71B{269}

WASHINGTON (UMNS) - The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of religious
organizations to share the same privileges available to secular groups in
using public facilities. 

The 6-3 verdict in the case of Good News Club v. Milford Central School was
announced June 11. 

Last fall, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society joined with
several other denominations and groups in filing a friend-of-the-court brief
siding with the Good News Club, which had sought to hold after-school
meetings in the Milford (N.Y.) School building in 1996.

"This is a basic church-state question," said Jaydee Hanson, a board staff
executive. "Just as our denomination's policies say that the state ought not
favor any particular religion, neither should it discriminate against
religion."

Milford School is the only school in the community, serving kindergarten
through 12th-grade children. Opponents of the Good News Club's use of the
building had argued that the conservative evangelical group should be
prohibited under constitutional guarantees of separation of church and
state. They said that because the club strives for a profession of faith in
Jesus Christ as a personal savior from children as young as 6, boys and
girls might confuse this religious instruction with their school classes.

Earlier Supreme Court decisions had cleared the way for religious clubs made
up of high school or college students to use public facilities on the same
basis that secular organizations were permitted to use them. This decision
extends that concept to elementary school children and facilities.

Hanson noted that in this case, nonreligious groups were permitted to use
the school for their meetings but religious groups were not. "It was really
discrimination against religious groups by virtue of their being religious
groups," he said. 

"We think the court made the right decision," he said. "That doesn't mean we
will always like what a particular religious group does in a club in school,
but that religious groups ought not be treated differently than other
secular groups that would use the school."

Other religious groups that signed the same legal brief included the
National Council of Churches, the American Muslim Council, the General
Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists, the Reorganized Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints, First Church of Christ Scientist, the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church in the U.S.A. and the Baptist Joint Committee's office of public
legislation.

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United Methodist News Service
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