Copyright 1994 The Buffalo News  
Buffalo News (New York)
June 30, 1994, Thursday, City Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE; Pg. 2

LENGTH: 600 words

HEADLINE: CHURCH AND STATE, DIVIDED;
COURT WISE TO RULE AGAINST SECT'S SCHOOL DISTRICT

BODY:
IN 1989, New York State made a unique accommodation to a small religious sect. Albany allowed the group's well-defined community boundary to be designated a separate school district so it could get public funds to help with the education of its handicapped children.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has correctly upheld a series of New York court rulings saying the creation of the Kiryas Joel Village School District runs counter to the establishment-of-religion clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The case has numerous elements that render it so distinct as to be one of a kind. But the result buttresses some essential bricks in the wall that separates church and state and ensures religious freedom.

To begin at the beginning, Kiryas Joel was created as a village in Orange County in 1975 as a haven for the Satmar Hasidic sect, practitioners of a strict form of Judaism.

The deeply religious Satmar live and pray on their own terms, keeping separate from the rest of the world. The people follow a strict dress code, pray according to a disciplined schedule, educate boys and girls separately, require arranged marriages, commonly have large families and speak Yiddish as their first language.

Most of the children in the 12,000-person village attend a parochial school run by the sect. If it stopped at that, there would be no problem. But the community -- where most
incomes are low -- asserts that it cannot afford the extra cost of educating its disabled children. At first, the local public school system -- the Monroe-Woodbury Central School District -- provided special education classes for them in the Kiryas Joel village school.

But later Monroe-Woodbury decided that the handicapped Satmar children should be placed in the district-wide special education classes with other children. Satmar parents withdrew their children on the grounds they were being traumatized by exposure to outside influences. The State Legislature and Gov. Cuomo responded by creating the separate Kiryas Joel school district, thereby creating eligibility for public funds for a school limited to members of one religious sect.

In the majority opinion, Justice David H. Souter ruled the creation of the separate Kiryas Joel school system "fails the test of neutrality" toward religion. The New York action, he said, wrongly extended a benefit to a group on the basis of religion. It seems dangerous, he wrote, "to validate what appears to me a clear religious preference."

Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent -- signed by two others -- ridicules the majority by supposing they think that the Satmar Hasidim has become the established religion of New York State. Big joke. But, as Souter noted, Scalia's reasoning points toward a much diminished establishment clause -- in other words, to a wide hole in the wall. In this case at least, the wall stays.

LOAD-DATE: July 2, 1994