Times Publishing Company St. Petersburg Times
(Florida)
December 14, 1993, Tuesday, City Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; COLUMNS; Pg. 13A
LENGTH: 859 words
HEADLINE:
Caught in the middle
BYLINE: Martin Dyckman
BODY: Not long ago, on the
occasion of our most distinctive holiday, Americans celebrated the memory
of people who wore strange clothes, held unorthodox religious views and
wanted only to be left alone.
They were called
Pilgrims. From their time to now, America has been the country that made
room for minority religions. The great principles that made this possible
found voice in the First Amendment, which provides that Congress "shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof . . ."
But those
principles have been at war with each other more than once, and never so
clearly as in the case that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear
concerning the Kiryas Joel school district in New York
state.
The New York Legislature created the district
to accommodate the special needs of some 200 children with physical,
mental or learning disabilities that cannot be served by the private
religious schools the rest of the town's 5,300 children attend. The
children with special needs had been attending public schools in the
existing Monroe-Woodbury district, but from the parents' viewpoint,
it did not work out.
Kiryas Joel, a
town of some 12,000, is populated exclusively by Hasidic Jews of the
Satmar sect. The ultra-orthodox religion they practice controls every act,
every minute of their daily lives. They do not watch television or read
newspapers. They dress strangely. They want more than anything else only
to be left alone.
Though the Kiryas
Joel school is nominally a full-service school, its students all have
special needs. None of the staff lives in the village. None is Hasidic.
The program is rigorously secular.
Nonetheless, the New
York Court of Appeals ruled 4-2 that this violated the establishment
clause. The effect, said the majority, was "to yield to the demands of a
religious community." This "symbolic union of church and
state," said the court, ". . . is sufficiently likely to be perceived
by the Satmarer Hasidim as an endorsement of their religious choices, or
by nonadherents as a disapproval of their individual religious
choices."
That's one way to look at it. The other, at
least as valid, is to invoke the free exercise clause. When the children
went to the schools in nearby Monroe, other children mocked their strange
clothes and manners. Two came home singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
There was an excursion to McDonald's, where nothing is kosher. The Monroe
public schools had raised what Dr. Steven Benardo, the superintendent at
Kiryas Joel, calls a cultural barrier between child and
family.
"Valentine's Day I consider secularly neutral.
This community does not. It considers it St. Valentine's Day," says
Benardo. "Halloween they would consider a religious if not Satanic holiday
. . . For this community, religion is not a weekend activity . . ."
It is unlikely that the republic is compromised simply
because this devout community has a public school of its own, no more so
than if somewhere in Utah is a school whose students are all Mormon. The
difference, if any, would be in the apparent intent.
The Supreme Court's decision to hear the case has many people worried
that the court may use it to scrap the formula it set up 22 years ago, in
Lemon vs. Kurtzman, for judging church-state conflicts. This isn't
terribly likely, not with Ruth Bader Ginsburg having replaced Byron White
on the court, but the fear is still appropriate. We shouldn't want to
regress, even slightly, to the days when the local public school served as
an annex to the prevailing local religion. This is how Talbot
"Sandy" D'Alemberte, former president of the American Bar Association
and incoming president of Florida State University, remembers his boyhood
in the Florida Panhandle.
"Back in
Chattahoochee," he said Monday, "virtually all the denominations had
revivals . . . and they felt as if it were their right to come in and hold
the revival at school, before the whole student body."
That experience, he said, made him "awfully skeptical" about any
accommodation such as Kiryas Joel.
I am a skeptic too. Yet the children of Kiryas Joel
also have a constitutional right to public help in overcoming their
handicaps, so long as it is provided in a secular setting, which seems to
be the case. The Supreme Court recently ruled that a deaf student who
attends a parochial school is entitled to an interpreter at public
expense. What is the difference?
Perhaps the New York
Legislature should have tailored the new school only to the
handicapped children. Perhaps it should have drawn the district
boundaries slightly larger. Or perhaps it should have simply seen to
giving the children a truly culturally neutral education in the Monroe
district. One can only hope that the court keeps in mind that it is
usually people who are caught in the middle when constitutional principles
clash, and that the people in the middle this time are the most vulnerable
of children.
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