finding no excessive entanglement in religion resulted from the Department of Health and Human Services' monitoring of federal grants to private organizations that provided counseling in the area of premarital adolescent sexual relations and pregnancy, even when the grantee was a religious organization, because the federal financial aid did not have the primary effect of advancing religion
How later courts described this case
- finding no excessive entanglement in religion resulted from the Department of Health and Human Services' monitoring of federal grants to private organizations that provided counseling in the area of premarital adolescent sexual relations and pregnancy, even when the grantee was a religious organization, because the federal financial aid did not have the primary effect of advancing religion
- holding constitutional on its face the Adolescent Family Life Act—an act providing grants to religious and other institutions giving counseling on teenage sexuality, without expressly requiring that the funds not be used for religious purposes—but remanding for a determination of the act’s constitutionality as applied
- concluding that monitoring of government grants given to nonprofit organizations that provide educational services did not amount to excessive entanglement because religiously affiliated organizations that may receive government funding are not “pervasively sectarian”
- holding that activities such as “adoption counseling and referral services” were not “specifically religious activities” and were “not converted into such activities by the fact that they [were] carried out by organizations with religious affiliations”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Kennedy,
with whom Justice Scalia joins, concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion, and write this separate concurrence to discuss one feature of the proceedings on remand. The Court states that “it will be open to appellees on remand to show that AFLA aid is flowing to grantees that can be considered ‘pervasively sectarian’ religious institutions, such as we have held parochial schools to be.” Ante, at 621. In my view, such a showing will not alone be enough, in an as-applied challenge, to make out a violation of the Establishment Clause.
Though I am not confident that the term “pervasively sectarian” is a well-founded juridical category, I recognize the thrust of our previous decisions that a statute which provides for exclusive or disproportionate funding to pervasively sectarian institutions may impermissibly advance religion and as such be invalid on its face. We hold today, however, that the neutrality of the grant requirements and the diversity of the organizations described in the statute before us foreclose the argument that it is disproportionately tied to pervasively sectarian groups. Ante, at 610-611. Having held that the statute is not facially invalid, the only purpose of further inquiring whether any particular grantee institution is pervasively sectarian is as a preliminary step to demonstrating that the funds are in fact being used to further religion. In sum, where, as in this litigation, a statute provides that the benefits of a program are to be distributed in a neutral fashion to religious and nonreligious applicants alike, and the program withstands a facial challenge, it is not unconstitutional as applied solely by reason of the religious-character of a specific recipient. The question in an as-applied challenge is not *625 whether the entity is of a religious character, but how it spends its grant.