244
Souter, J., dissenting
likely to be perceived by adherents of the controlling denominations as an endorsement, and by the nonadherents as a disapproval, of their individual religious choices"); Lee, supra, at 606-607 (Blackmun, J., concurring) ("When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion, it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some"); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421, 429 (1962) ("[A]nguish, hardship and bitter strife" result "when zealous religious groups struggl[e] with one another to obtain the Government's stamp of approval"). The human tendency, of course, is to forget the hard lessons, and to overlook the history of governmental partnership with religion when a cause is worthy, and bureaucrats have programs. That tendency to forget is the reason for having the Establishment Clause (along with the Constitution's other structural and libertarian guarantees), in the hope of stopping the corrosion before it starts.
These principles were violated by the programs at issue in Aguilar and Ball, as a consequence of several significant features common to both Title I, as implemented in New York City before Aguilar, and the Grand Rapids Shared Time program: each provided classes on the premises of the religious schools, covering a wide range of subjects including some at the core of primary and secondary education, like reading and mathematics; while their services were termed "supplemental," the programs and their instructors necessarily assumed responsibility for teaching subjects that the religious schools would otherwise have been obligated to provide, cf. Wolman v. Walter, 433 U. S. 229, 243 (1977) (provision of diagnostic tests to religious schools provides only an incidental benefit); the public employees carrying out the programs had broad responsibilities involving the exercise of considerable discretion, cf. Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School Dist., 509 U. S. 1, 13 (1993) (sign-language interpreter
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