IN SEARCH OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

This chapter discusses the origins of the Zobrests’ lawsuit against their public school district in Tucson, which refused on constitutional grounds to pay for Jim’s sign language interpreter in a Catholic school. For the Zobrests, federal disability laws and the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause entitled Jim to have this essential service. What follows is an analysis of the zigzag line of thinking employed by the U.S. Supreme Court as it grappled with church-state issues in the twentieth century prior to its consideration of the Zobrest case. For years, two titans of constitutional law—Catholic neoconservative William Bentley Ball and civil libertarian Leo Pfeffer—battled over what was legally permissible with regard to freedom of religion. Ultimately, the court enunciated a controversial Lemon Test to address this thorny area of its jurisprudence.