at the Supreme Court on Wednesday as the Justices heard arguments in a case about whether Missouri could bar a church from a playground-resurfacing program merely because it’s a church.... Discrimination against the church is a “clear burden on a constitutional right,” Justice Elena Kagan said, because “people of a certain religious status are being prevented from competing in the same way everybody else is for a neutral benefit.”
Columbia, Missouri-based Trinity Lutheran Church wanted to participate in a state program that reimburses groups or schools that want to resurface their playgrounds with rubber tire mulch to make them safer. Though the program is secular and serves a routine public purpose, the state ... claim[ed that] no public playground money could flow to a religious institution.
“There’s a constitutional principle. It’s as strong as any constitutional principle that there is,” Justice Kagan continued, “that when we have a program of funding—and here we’re funding playground surfaces—that everybody is entitled” to that funding “whether or not they are a religious institution doing religious things.”
