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Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
invocation or a message. In so doing, the school district exhibited a willingness to comply with, and exceed, Establishment Clause restrictions. Thus, the policy cannot be viewed as having a sectarian purpose.5
The Court also relies on our decision in Lee v. Weisman, 505 U. S. 577 (1992), to support its conclusion. In Lee, we concluded that the content of the speech at issue, a graduation prayer given by a rabbi, was "directed and controlled" by a school official. Id., at 588. In other words, at issue in Lee was government speech. Here, by contrast, the potential speech at issue, if the policy had been allowed to proceed, would be a message or invocation selected or created by a student. That is, if there were speech at issue here, it would be private speech. The "crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect," applies with particular force to the question of endorsement. Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 250 (1990) (plurality opinion) (emphasis in original).
Had the policy been put into practice, the students may have chosen a speaker according to wholly secular criteria— like good public speaking skills or social popularity—and the student speaker may have chosen, on her own accord, to deliver a religious message. Such an application of the policy
5 Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38 (1985), is distinguishable on these grounds. There we struck down an Alabama statute that added an express reference to prayer to an existing statute providing a moment of silence for meditation. Id., at 59. Here the school district added a secular alternative to a policy that originally provided only for prayer. More importantly, in Wallace, there was "unrebutted evidence" that pointed to a wholly religious purpose, id., at 58, and Alabama "conceded in the courts below that the purpose of the statute was to make prayer part of daily classroom activity," id., at 77-78 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment). There is no such evidence or concession here.
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