896
Souter, J., dissenting
Third, our cases have recognized the distinction, adopted by statute in the Chapter 2 legislation, between aid that merely supplements and aid that supplants expenditures for offerings at religious schools, the latter being barred. Although we have never adopted the position that any benefit that flows to a religious school is impermissible because it frees up resources for the school to engage in religious indoctrination, Hunt, supra, at 743, from our first decision holding it permissible to provide textbooks for religious schools we have repeatedly explained the unconstitutionality of aid that supplants an item of the school's traditional expense. See, e. g., Cochran v. Louisiana Bd. of Ed., 281 U. S. 370, 375 (1930) (noting that religious schools "are not the beneficiaries of these appropriations. They obtain nothing from them, nor are they relieved of a single obligation because of them" (internal quotation marks omitted)); Everson, 330 U. S., at 18 (specifically noting that bus fare program did not support or fund religious schools); Allen, 392 U. S., at 244 (stating that "the financial benefit [of providing the textbooks] is to parents and children, not to schools" (footnote omitted)); id.,
risk of the fostering of ideological views." The fact that the dissent saw things otherwise (as the plurality points out, ante, at 821) is beside the point here.
Similarly, the plurality is mistaken in reading our holdings in Mueller and Witters, see ante, at 821, to undermine divertibility as a relevant principle. First, these cases approved quite factually distinct types of aid; Mueller involving tax deductions, which have a quite separate history of approval, see 463 U. S., at 396, and nn. 5, 6 (citing Walz v. Tax Comm'n of City of New York, 397 U. S. 664 (1970)), and Witters involving scholarship money distributed to a university, not a primary or secondary school, see Tilton, 403 U. S., at 685-686, that was not significant enough as a whole to support that institution, Witters, 474 U. S., at 488. Second, in neither case did the program at issue provide direct aid on a schoolwide basis (as Chapter 2 does here); in both we found a distinction based on the genuinely independent, private choices which allocated such very different types of aid (tax deductions and university scholarship money that did not amount to substantial support of the university). See Mueller, supra, at 399; Witters, supra, at 488.
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