718
Opinion of O'Connor, J.
prudence back to what I think is the proper track—government impartiality, not animosity, toward religion.
IV
One aspect of the Court's opinion in these cases is worth noting: Like the opinions in two recent cases, Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577 (1992); Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School Dist., 509 U. S. 1 (1993), and the case I think is most relevant to these, Larson v. Valente, 456 U. S. 228 (1982), the Court's opinion does not focus on the Establishment Clause test we set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971).
It is always appealing to look for a single test, a Grand Unified Theory that would resolve all the cases that may arise under a particular Clause. There is, after all, only one Establishment Clause, one Free Speech Clause, one Fourth Amendment, one Equal Protection Clause. See Craig v. Boren, 429 U. S. 190, 211 (1976) (Stevens, J., concurring).
But the same constitutional principle may operate very differently in different contexts. We have, for instance, no one Free Speech Clause test. We have different tests for content-based speech restrictions, for content-neutral speech restrictions, for restrictions imposed by the government acting as employer, for restrictions in nonpublic fora, and so on. This simply reflects the necessary recognition that the interests relevant to the Free Speech Clause inquiry—personal liberty, an informed citizenry, government efficiency, public order, and so on—are present in different degrees in each context.
And setting forth a unitary test for a broad set of cases may sometimes do more harm than good. Any test that must deal with widely disparate situations risks being so vague as to be useless. I suppose one can say that the general test for all free speech cases is "a regulation is valid if the interests asserted by the government are stronger than the interests of the speaker and the listeners," but this would hardly be a serviceable formulation. Similarly,
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