Cite as: 515 U. S. 819 (1995)
Souter, J., dissenting
The principle against direct funding with public money is patently violated by the contested use of today's student activity fee.3 Like today's taxes generally, the fee is Madison's threepence. The University exercises the power of the State to compel a student to pay it, see Jefferson's Preamble, supra, and the use of any part of it for the direct support of religious activity thus strikes at what we have repeatedly
not the task at hand, however. Madison was acting with the specific goal of eliminating the special privileges enjoyed by Virginia Anglicans, and he made no effort to lay out the broader views of church and state that came to bear in his drafting of the First Amendment some 13 years later. That Madison did not speak in more expansive terms than necessary in 1776 was hardly surprising for, as it was, his proposal was defeated by the Virginia Convention as having gone too far. Ibid.
Similarly, the invocation of Madison's tenure on the congressional committee that approved funding for legislative chaplains provides no support for more general principles that run counter to settled Establishment Clause jurisprudence. As I have previously pointed out, Madison, upon retirement, "insisted that 'it was not with my approbation, that the deviation from [the immunity of religion from civil jurisdiction] took place in Congs., when they appointed Chaplains, to be paid from the Natl. Treasury.' " Lee, 505 U. S., at 625, n. 6, quoting Letter from J. Madison to E. Livingston (July 10, 1822), in 5 The Founders' Constitution 105 (P. Kur-land & R. Lerner eds. (1987)). And when we turned our attention to deciding whether funding of legislative chaplains posed an establishment problem, we did not address the practice as one instance of a larger class of permissible government funding of religious activities. Instead, Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U. S. 783, 791 (1983), explicitly relied on the singular, 200-year pedigree of legislative chaplains, noting that "[t]his unique history" justified carving out an exception for the specific practice in question. Given that the decision upholding this practice was expressly limited to its facts, then, it would stand the Establishment Clause on its head to extract from it a broad rule permitting the funding of religious activities.
3 In the District Court, the parties agreed to the following facts: "The University of Virginia has charged at all times relevant herein and currently charges each full-time student a compulsory student activity fee of $14.00 per semester. There is no procedural or other mechanism by which a student may decline to pay the fee." App. 37; see also id., at 9, 21.
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