When last we visited the legal wrangle over whether Enfield, CT could hold its high school graduation ceremonies in the sanctuary of a nearby magachurch, a federal judge had granted an injunction to the contrary, backed up by a lengthy opinion laying out why doing so would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Since then (i.e. a week ago) the Enfield school board voted 5-4 to hold the graduations at their two high schools and not to pursue the matter further in court–and then, yesterday evening, reversed itself on the legal issue, thanks to the switch of one Republican member.

This means that the Connecticut Family Institute–whose signature issue, same-sex marriage, is now a settled right in the Nutmeg State–has a new cause to justify its existence. And it means that the American Center for Law and Justice, which is handling the case for nothing, has a case it may well be able to ride up to the Supreme Court–unless the Enfield board re-reverses itself.

School board Chairman Gregory Stokes, the evangelical pastor who has pushed the church venue, cited an “overwhelming outcry” from the Enfield populace to justify moving ahead with an appeal. Board member Donna Szewczak said she switched her vote because “we needed to take a strong
stance” against the American Civil Liberties Union and People United for Separation of Church and State, the two groups who represented the anonymous plaintiffs (a non-religious and a Jewish family).

Although Hartford Courant columnist Rick Green has had a good time accusing the Connecticut Family Institute of being driven mostly by pecuniary self-interest, it’s normal for rights battles of this kind to be waged by professional partisans with agendas (and pecuniary needs) of their own. So what, exactly, are the agendas here?

Here’s what the head of the CFI told Green:

The
question of whether a graduation should be held at the church
should be up to the people. First Cathedral was being discriminated
against. This was a misreading of the First Amendment.

In
other words, religious institutions should be able to have the same
access to government contracts as non-religious institutions. This is
the “neutrality” claim that has been made with respect to government
funding of religious institutions under various faith-based initiatives.

On the other side, the ACLU is standing for the principle that
individuals participating in public school ceremonies should not be
subjected to religious messages as a matter of official policy. In the
1992 case Lee
v. Weisman, the Supreme Court held that officially
designated prayer at high school graduation ceremonies was
unconstitutional. The decision in the 5-4 case was written by Justice
Anthony Kennedy, who currently represents the swing vote in such
cases. Should the Enfield case reach the high court, the question will
be whether he will take an identical view of the sort of message sent to the
graduates by the crosses and other Christian iconography present in
Bloomfield’s First Cathedral church.

Americans tend to have a visceral sympathy for Free Exercise claims. For
example, it’s not hard to get laws passed giving individuals rights to
take days off from work etc. for religious reasons. But there’s far more
resistance to Establishment cases, where plaintiffs
object to some arguably religious public practice or installation that strikes the majority as innocuous. The prayer and Bible reading decisions of the early 1960s are still hard for many to swallow.

The other evening I was sitting around with some friends from the
neighborhood who said they were going to stop contributing to the ACLU
because it had gone too far in the Enfield case. When I suggested that
they might feel differently if they belonged to a religious minority,
they were polite enough not to disagree–but whether they’ll be writing
those checks, I don’t know.

Once upon a time, America’s public schools began each day with a reading
from the King James Version of the Bible. The Roman Catholics, considering it a Protestant thing, protested.
The Protestants were unimpressed. So the Catholics set up a school system of their own.