Professor Michael Helfand, Exposing the Hidden Web of Religious Discrimination in Government Funding -- City Journal

Professor Michael A. Helfand's opinion article, Exposing the Hidden Web of Religious Discrimination in Government Funding, is published in City Journal. The article, co-authored with Nicole Stelle Garnett, examines government programs that  exclude religious schools, hospitals, charities, and social-services groups from funding that they would otherwise be eligible to receive—or require them to secularize as a condition of participation.

Excerpt from Exposing the Hidden Web of Religious Discrimination in Government Funding

Many of these discriminatory laws stem from an outdated understanding of the Constitution. For decades, courts and legislatures followed a distorted interpretation of the First Amendment that effectively excluded religious institutions from government funding. Much of this was driven by the now-abandoned “Lemon Test”—an ahistorical, three-part legal test invented by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s to govern in Establishment Clause cases. Relying on that framework, lawmakers and judges adopted an aggressive—and misguided—reading of the Establishment Clause, treating the equal inclusion of religion in public programs as unconstitutional. The result: for nearly half a century, legislatures wrote funding rules that specifically targeted religious institutions for exclusion.

The complete article may be found at City Journal