Cite as: 536 U. S. 639 (2002)
Souter, J., dissenting
On the other hand, the Court has found the gross amount unhelpful for Establishment Clause analysis when the aid afforded a benefit solely to one individual, however substantial as to him, but only an incidental benefit to the religious school at which the individual chose to spend the State's money. See Witters, 474 U. S., at 488; cf. Zobrest, 509 U. S., at 12. When neither the design nor the implementation of an aid scheme channels a series of individual students' subsidies toward religious recipients, the relevant benefici-aries for establishment purposes, the Establishment Clause is unlikely to be implicated. The majority's reliance on the observations of five Members of the Court in Witters as to the irrelevance of substantiality of aid in that case, see ante, at 651, is therefore beside the point in the matter before us, which involves considerable sums of public funds systematically distributed through thousands of students attending religious elementary and middle schools in the city of Cleveland.19
19 No less irrelevant, and lacking even arguable support in our cases, is Justice O'Connor's argument that the $8.2 million in tax-raised funds distributed under the Ohio program to religious schools is permissible under the Establishment Clause because it "pales in comparison to the amount of funds that federal, state, and local governments already provide religious institutions," ante, at 665. Our cases have consistently held that state benefits at some level can go to religious institutions when the recipients are not pervasively sectarian, see, e. g., Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 672 (1971) (aid to church-related colleges and universities); Bradfield v. Roberts, 175 U. S. 291 (1899) (religious hospitals); when the benefit comes in the form of tax exemption or deduction, see, e. g., Walz v. Tax Comm'n of City of New York, 397 U. S. 664 (1970) (property-tax exemptions); Mueller v. Allen, 463 U. S. 388 (1983) (tax deductions for educational expenses); or when the aid can plausibly be said to go to individual university students, see, e. g., Witters v. Washington Dept. of Servs. for Blind, 474 U. S. 481 (1986) (state scholarship programs for higher education, and by extension federal programs such as the G. I. Bill). The fact that those cases often allow for large amounts of aid says nothing about direct aid to pervasively sectarian schools for religious teaching. This "greater justifies the lesser" argument not only ignores the aforementioned cases, it would completely swallow up our aid-to-school cases from Everson onward: if $8.2 million in vouchers is acceptable, for example,
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