West virginia v barnett. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette 2022-10-16
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West Virginia v. Barnett, also known as the "West Virginia Textbook Case," was a landmark Supreme Court case that dealt with the issue of school prayer in public schools. The case was brought before the Court in 1961 and was decided in 1963.
At the heart of the case was a West Virginia statute that required schools to open each day with a nondenominational prayer or a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. The statute also required students to participate in this daily ritual unless they obtained a written excuse from their parents.
The case was brought by a group of parents and students who challenged the constitutionality of the statute, arguing that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the challengers, striking down the West Virginia statute as unconstitutional. In its decision, the Court held that the statute's requirement that students participate in a daily prayer or recitation of the Lord's Prayer was a form of government-sanctioned religious activity, and as such, it constituted an unconstitutional establishment of religion.
The Court also noted that the statute violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free exercise of religion. By requiring students to participate in a daily prayer or recitation of the Lord's Prayer, the Court argued, the statute imposed a particular religious practice on students who may not believe in that religion or who may have different religious beliefs.
The decision in West Virginia v. Barnett was a significant victory for those who support the separation of church and state, and it helped to establish the principle that public schools must remain neutral on matters of religion. Today, the case is still widely cited as an important precedent in debates over the role of religion in public schools and other government-funded institutions.
We The Students: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Gobitis, supra, at We think these issues may be examined free of pressure or restraint growing out of such considerations. Barnette, patriotism and free speech still collide now and then. Of course, patriotism cannot be enforced by the flag salute. And even though legislation relates to civil liberties, our duty of deference to those who have the responsibility for making the laws is no less relevant or less exacting. Parents who are dissatisfied with the public schools thus carry a double educational burden. For refusal to conform with the requirement the State law prescribes ex- The right of freedom of thought and of religion as guaranteed by the Constitution against State action includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all, except in so far as essential operations of government may require it for the preservation of an orderly society,-as in the case of compulsion to give evidence in court. Justice Cardozo, to mention only those no longer on the Court.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette :: 319 U.S. 624 (1943) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center
It is not clear whether the regulation contemplates that pupils forego any contrary convictions of their own and become unwilling converts to the prescribed ceremony or whether it will be acceptable if they simulate assent by words without belief and by a gesture barren of meaning. In his dissent, Justice Frankfurter argued that the law in question was not discriminatory because it required all children to pledge allegiance to the American flag, not just some. We must decide this These questions are not lightly stirred. Nor does our duty to apply the Bill of Rights to assertions of official authority depend upon our possession of marked competence in the field where the invasion of rights occurs. Under our constitutional system, the legislature is charged solely with civil concerns of society. It can only say "This or that law is void.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Any person may therefore believe or disbelieve what he pleases. In neither situation is our function comparable to that of a legislature or are we free to act as though we were a superlegislature. Following the decision by this Court on June 3, 1940, in Minersville School District v. Free Speech on Trial: Communication Perspectives on Landmark Supreme Court Decisions. Seldom, indeed, as they imagined, under our system, would this great, novel, tremendous power of the courts be exerted -- would this sacred ark of the covenant be taken from within the veil.
West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
The State asserts power to condition access to public education on making a prescribed sign and profession and at the same time to coerce attendance by punishing both parent and child. Neither Justice Frankfurter said that the court was overstepping its bounds in striking down the West Virginia law. Not so long ago, we were admonished that "the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint. Lyle, see Hamilton v. Gobitis was bad law and should be overruled.
West Virginia v. Barnette: The freedom to not pledge allegiance
Minersville School District v. The Jehovah's Witnesses, without any desire to show disrespect for either the flag or the country, interpret the Bible as commanding, at the risk of God's displeasure, that they not go through the form of a pledge of allegiance to any flag. There is no warrant in the constitutional basis of this Court's authority for attributing different roles to it depending upon the nature of the challenge to the legislation. The requirement of Bible- reading has been justified by various state courts as an appropriate means of inculcating ethical precepts and familiarizing pupils with the most lasting expression of great English literature. Let them resolutely adhere to first principles. But to deny that it presents a question upon which men might reasonably differ appears to me to be intolerance. Indeed, in the first three cases to come before the Court, the constitutional claim now sustained was deemed so clearly unmeritorious that this Court dismissed the appeals for want of a substantial federal question.
Saluting the Flag: WV State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)
Compelling belief implies denial of opportunity to combat it and to assert dissident views. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us. But here the power of com- Whether the First Amendment to the Constitution will permit officials to order observance of ritual of this nature does not depend upon whether as a voluntary exercise we would think it to be good, bad or merely innocuous. So far as the state was concerned, there was to be neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy. That wisdom might suggest the making of such accommodations, and that school administration would not find it too difficult to make them, and yet maintain the ceremony for those not refusing to conform, is outside our province to suggest. It restrained enforcement as to the plaintiffs and those of that class.
WEST VIRGINIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION v. BARNETTE
And so, when confronted with the task of considering the claims of immunity from obedience to a law dealing with civil affairs because of religious scruples, we cannot conceive religion more narrowly than in the terms in which Judge Augustus N. Gobitis opinion, especially rejecting Justice Frankfurter's deference to legislative policymaking authority. The Gobitis opinion reasoned that this is a field "where courts possess no marked, and certainly no controlling, competence," that it is committed to the legislatures, as well as the courts, to guard cherished liberties, and that it is constitutionally appropriate to "fight out the wise use of legislative authority in the forum of public opinion and before legislative assemblies, rather than to transfer such a contest to the judicial arena," since all the "effective means of inducing political changes are left free. Whether the First Amendment to the Constitution will permit officials to order observance of ritual of this nature does not depend upon whether as a voluntary exercise we would think it to be good, bad or merely innocuous. But it is the best of reasons, as this Court has frequently recognized, for the greatest caution in its use. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
The requirement of Bible reading has been justified by various state courts as an appropriate means of inculcating ethical precepts and familiarizing pupils with the most lasting expression of great English literature. It is now a commonplace that censorship or suppression of expression of opinion is tolerated by our Constitution only when the expression presents a clear and present danger of action of a kind the State is empowered to prevent and punish. And the question here is whether the state may make certain requirements that seem to it desirable or important for the proper education of those future citizens who go to schools maintained by the states, or whether the pupils in those schools may be relieved from those requirements if they run counter to the consciences of their parents. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. The last leg of Frankfurter's Gobitis opinion reasoned that matters like saluting the flag were issues of "school discipline" that are better left to local officials rather than federal judges. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies.
Such Boards are numerous, and their territorial jurisdiction often small. JUSTICE BLACK and MR. Was it right or wrong? Only 8 percent of the freshman class took courses in United States history, although 30 percent was enrolled in European or world history courses. By some, in- I am unable to agree that the benefits that may accrue to society from the compulsory flag salute are sufficiently definite and tangible to justify the invasion of freedom and privacy that it entailed or to compensate for a restraint on the freedom of the individual to be vocal or silent according to his conscience or personal inclination. In view of this history, it must be plain that what thirteen Justices found to be within the constitutional authority of a state, legislators cannot be deemed unreasonable in enacting.
Assurance that rights are secure tends to diminish fear and jealousy of strong government, and, by making us feel safe to live under it, makes for its better support. Religious liberty means freedom from conformity to the religious dogmas of others, not freedom from conformity to the law because of their own religious dogmas. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard". It can never be emphasized too much that one's own opinion about the wisdom or evil of a law should be excluded altogether when one is doing one's duty on the bench. Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?. But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. Symbolism is a primitive but effective way of communicating ideas.
