That which so interferes or hinders the state in providing the best education possible for its people, must be eliminated or circumscribed as needed. This is true even when that which is condemned is the exercise of a constitutionally protected right.
Henceforth, district courts need not hold an evidentiary hearing in cases of this nature. Where a complaint merely alleges the constitutional invalidity of a high school hair and grooming regulation, the district courts are directed to grant an immediate motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted.
We think it plain that individual liberties may be ranked in a spectrum of importance. At one end of the spectrum *696 are the great liberties such as speech, religion, and association specifically guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Of equal importance are liberties such as the right of marital privacy that are so fundamental that, even in the absence of a positive command from the Constitution, they may be restricted only for compelling state interests. At the other end of the spectrum are the lesser liberties that may be invaded by the state subject only to the same minimum test of rationality that applies to all state action.
We come then to the quality of the claims of the respondents .... In evaluating those claims we must be careful to determine whether the Amish religious faith and their mode of life are, as they claim, inseparable and interdependent. A way of life, however virtuous and admirable, may not be interposed as a barrier to reasonable state regulation of education if it is based on purely secular considerations .... [T]he very concept of ordered liberty precludes allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests.
Only three holdings of this Court rest in whole or in part upon a substantive constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children [citing Meyer, Pierce, and Yoder ]. The sheer diversity of today's opinions persuades me that the theory of unenumerated parental rights underlying these three cases has small claim to stare decisis protection.... While I would not now overrule those earlier cases (that has not been urged), neither would I extend the theory upon which they rested to this new context.
[T]he distinction Smith draws strikes me as ultimately untenable. If a hybrid claim is simply one in which another constitutional right is implicated, then the hybrid exception would be so vast as to swallow the Smith rule, and, indeed, the hybrid exception would cover the situation exemplified by Smith, since free speech and associational rights are certainly implicated in the peyote ritual. But if a hybrid claim is one in which a *705 litigant would actually obtain an exemption from a formally neutral, generally applicable law under another constitutional provision, then there would have been no reason for the Court in what Smith calls the hybrid cases to have mentioned the Free Exercise Clause at all.
We find that the plaintiffs' allegations do not bring them within the sweep of Yoder for two distinct reasons. First, as we explained, the plaintiffs' allegations of interference with family relations and parental prerogatives do not state a privacy or substantive due process claim. Their free exercise challenge is thus not conjoined with an independently protected constitutional protection. Second, their free exercise claim is qualitatively distinguishable from that alleged in Yoder.
We do not see how a state regulation would violate the Free Exercise Clause if it implicates other constitutional rights but would not violate the Free Exercise Clause if it did not implicate other constitutional rights.... [T]he Smith Court did not explain how the standards under the Free Exercise Clause would change depending on whether other constitutional rights are implicated.
[T]herefore, at least until the Supreme Court holds that legal standards under the Free Exercise Clause vary depending on whether other constitutional rights are implicated, we will not use a stricter legal standard than that used in Smith to evaluate generally applicable, exceptionless state regulations under the Free Exercise Clause.
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