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Minersville
School District v. Gobitis
310
U.S. 586 (1940)
The
Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons Religious Institutions
Group gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center which provided the following case commentary taken from Terry Eastland, Religious
Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define
the Debate over Church and State (1993).
The
Supreme Court concluded in this 1940 case that a public
school may require students to salute and pledge allegiance
to the U.S. flag; a member of Jehovah's Witnesses had objected
on free-exercise grounds. The holding in Minersville
School District v. Gobitis had a short life, as it was
overruled in 1943 by West Virginia State Board of Education
v. Barnette, Case 3. (See Justice Antonin Scalia's treatment
of Gobitis in his opinion for the Court half a century
later in Employment Division v. Smith [1990], Case
23.)
Justice
Felix Frankfurter, who wrote for the Court in Gobitis
and filed a lengthy dissent in Barnette, saw these
cases as presenting free-exercise claims for special exemption
from otherwise valid law. Frankfurter did not believe it
was the business of the federal judiciary to issue such
an exemption; for that, Frankfurter believed, a complaining
party must go to the relevant legislative body.
The
only other opinion in the case was a dissent by Justice
Harlan Stone, who argued that it was indeed the job of the
judiciary to demand a reasonable accommodation between the
interests of government and the interests of liberty. As
will be seen in Justice Robert Jackson's opinion for the
Court in Barnette, the flag-salute cases may also
be understood in a different way: in terms not of a free-exercise
claim but of government authority to compel any American
to profess certain words or ideas. Both Frankfurter's opinion
for the Court and Stone's dissent are presented here, followed
by an editorial comment from The Christian Century.
Like
Case 1, Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), and many
other civil-liberties cases in the 1930s and 1940s, Gobitis
involved complaints against a state by Jehovah's Witnesses.
Lillian Gobitis, 12, and her brother William, 10, were expelled
from the public schools of Minersville, Pennsylvania, because
they refused, on grounds of their faith, to salute and pledge
allegiance to the U.S. flag as part of a daily exercise
mandated by the local school board. Walter Gobitis, their
father, sued and won relief in federal district court; the
Minersville school board was enjoined from continuing to
demand participation in the flag-salute ceremony. This order
was affirmed by a federal appeals court—and then reversed
by the Supreme Court.
Participating
in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, decided
June 3, 1940, were Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes and Associate
Justices Hugo L. Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter,
James C. McReynolds, Frank Murphy, Stanley F. Reed, Owen
J. Roberts, and Harlan F. Stone.
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