Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940)
Supreme Court Decisions on Religious Liberty
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Background Information
Two Jehovah's Witness school children, 10 (William) and 12 (Lillian) years old, were suspended from school in Minersville, Pennsylvania, because they refused to salute the American flag during mandatory morning exercises. As a result, their father had to pay for them to enroll in a private school.
The parents alleged that their children's' due process rights had been violated by the school and sued.
Court Decision
In an 8-1 Court Decision with Justice Frankfurter writing the majority opinion, the Supreme Court found that the school district had a strong interest in creating national unity that was sufficient to permit them to compell students to salute the flag.
This case required the Court to balance the religious interests of the Jehovah's Witness children with the secular interests of the school district:
Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs. The mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities. The necessity for this adjustment has again and again been recognized. In a number of situations the exertion of political authority has been sustained, while basic considerations of religious freedom have been left inviolate.
According to Frankfurter, the nation needed loyalty and the unity of all the people. Since saluting the flag was a primary means of achieving this legitimate goal, an issue of national importance was at stake:
National unity is the basis of national security. ...The ultimate foundation of a free society is the binding tie of cohesive sentiment. ...'We live by these symbols.' The flag is a symbol of our national unity, transcending all internal differences, however large, within the framework of the Constitution.
Even though the members of the Court disagreed that a compulsory flag salute is the best way to create national unity, the flaws in the school district's judgment was not enough to actually rule that their practice was unconstitutional.
The Court also found that students would not be pulled away from their faith by partaking in the pledge because their parents have a much greater influence than the school in the development of their religious beliefs.
In his dissent, Justice Stone argued that this law represented a gross violation of the children's religious liberties:
[This law] does more than suppress freedom of speech and more than prohibit the free exercise of religion, which concededly are forbidden by the First Amendment and are violations of the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth. For by this law the state seeks to coerce these children to express a sentiment which, as they interpret it, they do not entertain, and which violates their deepest religious convictions. ...The very essence of the liberty which they guaranty is the freedom of the individual from compulsion as to what he shall think and what he shall say, at least where the compulsion is to bear false witness to his religion. If these guaranties are to have any meaning they must, I think, be deemed to withhold from the state any authority to compel belief or the expression of it where that expression violates religious convictions, whatever may be the legislative view of the desirability of such compulsion.
Stone was also particularly concerned about the impact this sort of law would have on religious minorities:
History teaches us that there have been but few infringements of personal liberty by the state which have not been justified, as they are here, in the name of righteousness and the public good, and few which have not been directed, as they are now, at politically helpless minorities.
Significance
This decision described the case as a balancing of conflicting claims of liberty and authority. The school's interest in creating national unity was, in their opinion, more important than the rights of the students to refuse to salute the flag. The needs of authority won out over the needs of liberty - a familiar tune in American history.
Justice Harlan Stone wrote a strongly-worded dissent which became a primary basis of the reversal of this decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette three years later.
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