Ominous Decision

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision last week that directly affected only a small, freakish religious sect, but indirectly affected nothing less than freedom of conscience.

The court ruled, 5-to-4, that religious freedom, along with free speech and a free press, can be limited, despite the Bill of Rights, "to times, places and methods . . . not at odds with the preservation of peace and good order." In the three cases up for decision, the Court ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses (a band of religious zealots who do most of their proselyting by peddling or handing out pamphlets from door to door) can be forced by any town they visit to pay a prohibitively high peddler's tax for the right to distribute their pamphlets.

Furthermore, town officials can revoke the right to distribute literature at any time--even after Witnesses have paid the tax--"without cause, notice or hearing."

Like the Stamp Tax? This means, declared Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone in a trenchant minority opinion, that "a way has been found for the effective suppression of speech and press and religion despite constitutional guarantees. The very taxes now before us are better adapted to that end than were the stamp taxes which so successfully curtailed the dissemination of ideas by 18th-Century newspapers and pamphleteers, and which were a moving cause of the American Revolution."

Two years ago Justice Stone was the lone dissenter in another far-reaching Supreme Court decision against the Witnesses. Then the eight other Justices ruled that Witness children could be required by local law to salute the flag, even though the salute violated their religious freedom. Last week three of the eight--Hugo L. Black, William O. Douglas and Frank Murphy--sided with Stone, publicly acknowledged that they had "wrongly decided " the 1940 case, and declared that both it and last week's ruling suppress "the free exercise of a religion practiced by a minority."

Justice Murphy, a devout Roman Catholic (a church the Witnesses bitterly attack) was; even more explicit than the Chief Justice in pointing out the majority decision's threat to religious freedom. Wrote he: "The taxes are in reality taxes upon the dissemination of religious literature for religious reasons alone and not for personal profit. ... If this Court is to err in evaluating claims that freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion have been invaded, far better that it err in being overprotective of these precious rights."

Smallness v. Sincerity. Outstanding churchmen were notably chary last week about expressing clear-cut opinions on the Supreme Court decision. But the press was outspoken. Said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "If a small sect can be denied its constitutional rights, the way is open to deny them to other sects." Said the New York Times: "Jehovah's Witnesses suffer because they are a small and, to many, an obnoxious sect. The minorities whose civil rights are threatened are always small and, to many, obnoxious. . . . Yet their treatment is the test, and will always be the test, of the sincerity with which we cling to the Bill of Rights. If those of us who belong to the larger groups do not defend the rights of persons with whom we disagree, and whom we may actually detest, we are confessing that we hold our own rights on sufferance, or by our numbers, or by our political or other power."

Churches and charitable institutions, the Treasury Department has announced, may invest up to $100,000 a year in war bonds instead of the mere $50,000 permitted other organizations. But not before July 1.

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