That decision established that a State may not support religious education either through direct grants to parochial schools or through financial aid to parents of parochial school students.
Fundraising may be conducted to support religious, charitable, educational, literary, and scientific organizations, funds, foundations, and causes.
And liberal groups have a point: taxpayers have the right to know that their money will not support religious beliefs they may not share.
If highly educated people are more capable of the speculative reasoning that is needed for intellectual inquiry, they may also be more able or willing to make the abstractions needed to support religious beliefs.
Support religious tax exemptions.
And they have pushed the courts into allowing more government money to support religious activities: the Supreme Court has sanctioned vouchers to be used at religious schools.This awkward balance between the state financing of the sacred (good) and allowing displays of it (bad) owes much to Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing voter on religious issues and one of the justices who may soon retire.
For, as we have construed it, the DRR allows that religious citizens may support coercive laws for religious reasons (so long as they have and are prepared to provide a plausible secular justification for these laws).
If the pursuit fails, then they may support these laws for exclusively religious reasons.
But this negative constraint is typically conjoined with a permission: although citizens may not support coercive laws for which they believe themselves to have only a religious rationale, they may support coercive laws for which they believe there is only a plausible secular rationale.
This loose group of mostly young white men are tech- and media-savvy and not particularly religious, oppose immigration, and may support more extreme steps to make America whiter, such as repealing the 14th Amendment, which guarantees birthright citizenship.
