Likewise, the Good News Club also sought to teach moral values to children, albeit from an explicitly Christian viewpoint.

[1] Applying Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384 (1993),[4] and Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819 (1995).

According to the majority, the Court's prior decisions in Lamb's Chapel and Rosenberger determined the outcome of the Good News Club's free speech claim.

In Lamb's Chapel, the Court had ruled that a different New York public school had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when it forbade a religious group from using its facilities to show films that taught "family values from a Christian perspective".

It saw no difference between the films that the religious group in Lamb's Chapel proposed to show and the songs and lessons the Good News Club used in this case.

In spite of these decisions, the Second Circuit had ruled in this case that the religious nature of the Good News Club's message meant that it "fell outside the bounds of" speech related to "pure moral and character development", and hence was not entitled to First Amendment protection.

Milford also argued that its interest in not violating the Establishment Clause justified its excluding the Good News Club from its facilities.

[8] In Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), the religious speech involved was a prohibition on teaching evolution in public school science classes.

Fourth, the children required their parents permission to attend the Club's activities; they were not permitted to "loiter outside classrooms after the schoolday has ended".

All these considerations suggested that there was no Establishment Clause violation involved in Milford's permitting the Club to meet on its premises after school hours.

Milford could not justify excluding the Club simply because its speech was religious in nature, and so Scalia did not worry whether the discrimination was content-based or viewpoint-based.

"The critical Establishment Clause question here may well prove to be whether a child, participating in the Good News Club's activities, could reasonably perceive the endorsement of religion" on the part of the school.

If a school decides to authorize afterschool discussions of current events in its classrooms, it may not exclude people from expressing their views simply because it dislikes their particular political opinions.

Such recruiting meetings may introduce divisiveness and tend to separate young children into cliques that undermine the school's educational mission.

The majority avoids this reality only by resorting to the bland and general characterization of Good News's activity as 'teaching of morals and character, from a religious standpoint'.

Neither the district court nor the Second Circuit had based their rulings on the Establishment Clause, because they had found no First Amendment violation stemming from Milford's actions.

The film in Lamb's Chapel was open to the general public and aimed at adults, not children, and the school facilities had been used by a wide variety of private organizations, just as there were a large number of student groups in Widmar.

In view of the state of the record, the "facts we know (or think we know) point away from the majority's conclusion, and while the consolation may be that nothing really gets resolved when the judicial process is so truncated, that is not much to recommend today's result."