Supreme Court rules for church in case involving rubber playground surfacing

WASHINGTON — The Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) violated the rights of a Lutheran church school when it denied a grant for the church to install a rubber playground surface at the school, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a 7-2 decision.

In 2012, the Trinity Lutheran Church Child Learning Center in Columbia, Mo., applied to the DNR for a grant to replace pea gravel playground surfacing at the school with a pour-in-place rubber surface, under Missouri's Scrap Tire Program.

However, the agency denied the church's application, saying it violated the state constitution's rule against providing direct financial assistance to a church.

"Although the center ranked fifth out of the 44 applicants, it did not receive a grant because it is a church," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the court.

"The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, simply because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution…and cannot stand," Justice Roberts wrote.

Several justices wrote separate opinions, differing on various legal points but agreeing with the main point of the ruling. Only Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented completely from the decision.

"This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government," Justice Sotomayor wrote. "The court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.

"Its decision slights both our precedents and our history, ad its reasoning weakens the country's longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both," she wrote.