The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a New York state school may not prohibit an evangelical Christian children's club from meeting on its premises, a decision that may have cleared the last legal obstacles to religious groups' long-sought goal of having the same access to school facilities as other organizations.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the court held that the Milford Central School's effort to deny the after-school use of its building to the Good News Club, but not to other, nonreligious groups, was a form of discrimination on the basis of religious viewpoint, and thus violated the constitutional guarantee of free speech.
The Good News Club, which operates thousands of chapters around the country, urges children as young as 6 to accept Jesus Christ as a personal savior. The school argued that, in barring the club from meeting there, it was following a New York law designed to avert any appearance of official sponsorship of religious worship and to protect children from getting the impression that the school endorses a particular religion.
But the court rejected the notion that the club's use of the school would create a kind of pro-religious pressure on children, noting that children could not attend the club's meetings unless their parents approved.
"[W]e cannot say the danger that children would misperceive the endorsement of religion is any greater than the danger that they would perceive a hostility toward the religious viewpoint if the Club were excluded," Justice Clarence Thomas said in the opinion he wrote for the court.
Conservative legal scholars noted that the case fits into a recent trend in which the court has adopted a more accommodating position toward religion in public places when it believes that it is merely maintaining a fair balance between religious and secular activity. That could mean future support for President Bush's "faith-based" social services initiative, or for school vouchers, they said.
"It will be much harder for anyone to argue that a faith-based organization's social service treatment program has crossed a line, becoming, in essence, 'too religious,' " said Douglas Kmiec, dean of the Catholic University law school.
But Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the decision maintains a distinction between state support for religious instruction and extracurricular religious activity, and therefore "has no spillover into the voucher area."
Of the 4,622 Good News Club chapters around the country, about 527 meet regularly in public school buildings. Supporters of the group said the ruling gives a significant boost to the club and others like it.
"It's no secret that it helps them attract children when they meet in a more convenient location," said Gregory S. Baylor of Annandale-based Religious Liberty Advocates, which filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of Good News's parent organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship Inc. "Prior to this, a lot of school districts were nervous about letting them in. Now I can say, 'Read the Supreme Court case.' "
Opponents agreed with this forecast, but they said it shows how the court has tilted the church-state balance in favor of religion.
"This is really religious worship directed at young children," said Jeffrey R. Babbin, an attorney who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which backed the school. "Our concern is that what can't be done in school shouldn't be done right after. Often kids can't go home right after school."
The case began in 1996 when two parents, the Rev. Stephen D. Fournier and his wife, Darleen, sought to move the meetings of their Good News Club chapter from a local church to Milford's only school building, which houses all classes from kindergarten through 12th grade.
School authorities in the 3,000-resident rural community refused, saying that the Good News Club was not simply a discussion group that talked about morals from a religious viewpoint, but a form of religious instruction.
The Good News Club's sponsoring organization, the Child Evangelism Fellowship, based in Warrenton, Mo., says that its purpose is to "evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living."
Good News Club meetings revolve around prayer, songs, stories and games drawn from the Bible, and some of the children attending are "challenged" to declare Jesus Christ as their savior.
The Fourniers sued in federal court. The New York-based appeals court sided with the school, but because its ruling clashed with a St. Louis-based appeals court's decision in favor of access for another Good News Club, the Supreme Court agreed last year to decide the dispute.
In the court opinion yesterday, Thomas said that this case was essentially no different from previous ones in which the court had upheld the right of a Christian parents' group to show a film at a public high school in the evening and of Christian students at the University of Virginia to receive the same funding for their publication as other groups.
When the state operates a "limited public forum" in which citizens may express their views, Thomas wrote, "speech discussing otherwise permissible subjects cannot be excluded . . . on the ground that the subject is discussed from a religious viewpoint."
Thomas was joined by the court's other conservative-leaning members -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy. He also picked up the vote of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, a liberal, who wrote a separate opinion to emphasize that he supported the club's position only insofar as it was asking for nondiscrimination by the school. He said important issues remained to be examined, especially whether a reasonable child might indeed see the club's presence at the school as an endorsement of religion.
Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.
"It is beyond question that Good News intends to use the public school premises not for the mere discussion of a subject from a particu99lar, 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 case is Good News Club v. Milford Central School, No. 99-2036.