Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Forthcoming Article "Espinoza, Government Funding, and Religious Choice"
Doug Laycock and I have posted this paper on SSRN; it draws on but significantly expands on our brief for the Christian Legal Society and others in the Espinoza case. From the abstract:
There was nothing surprising about the [Espinoza] decision, and it changed little; it was the inevitable next link in a long chain of decisions. To those observers still attached to the most expansive rhetoric of no-aid separationism, it is the world turned upside down.
But the Court has been steadily marching away from that rhetoric for thirty-five years now. The more recent decisions, including Espinoza, do a far better job than no-aid separationism of separating the religious choice and commitments of the American people from the coercive power of the government. And that is the separation that is and should be the ultimate concern of the Religion Clauses—to minimize the government’s interference with or influence on religion, and to leave each American free to exercise or reject religion in his or her own way, neither encouraged by the government nor discouraged or penalized by the government.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2020/08/forthcoming-article-espinoza-government-funding-and-religious-choice.html