U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of Trinity Lutheran in Missouri church-state case

WASHINGTON • In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court overturned lower courts Monday and decided in favor of a Columbia, Mo., church, that had argued that its constitutional rights had been violated by the state Department of Natural Resources’ denial of scrap rubber for its playground.

Writing for the majority in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia vs. Comer, Chief Justice John Roberts proclaimed that Trinity was “asserting a right to participate in a government benefit program without having to disavow its religious character.

“The express discrimination against religious exercise here is not the denial of a grant, but rather the refusal to allow the church — solely because it is a church — to compete with secular organizations for a grant,” Roberts wrote, in a decision in which Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Samuel Alito concurred.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. In a strongly worded dissent twice as long as Roberts’ majority, Sotomayor warned that “the court today blinds itself” to the history of church-state separation, “and leads us instead to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.”

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