A state cannot deny qualified churches from receiving public aid, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

“The government should treat children’s safety at religious schools the same as it does at nonreligious schools. The Supreme Court’s decision today affirms that common-sense principle and the larger truth that government isn’t being neutral when it treats religious organizations worse than everyone else,” David Cortman, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, stated on Monday, June 26.

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The group Alliance Defending Freedom represented Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Missouri, in a case that revolved around a children’s playground at the church.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer in April. (Carol Comer is the director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.)

Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Missouri, wanted to use a statewide grant program to help fund a rubberized surface for a playground at the Child Learning Center preschool and day care program operated by the church.

“Equal treatment of a religious organization in a program that provides only secular benefits, like a partial reimbursement grant for playground surfacing, isn’t a government endorsement of religion,” Alliance Defending Freedom’s Cortman said in a statement. “As the Supreme Court rightly found, unequal treatment that singles out a preschool for exclusion from such a program simply because a church runs the school is clearly unconstitutional.”

Cortman argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Trinity Lutheran.

Though the church met the qualifications to participate in the state scrap-tire grant program, the state government denied it partial reimbursement funding. Missourians pay a 50-cent tax on tire purchases to fund the grant program.

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“The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution . . . and cannot stand,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

He authored the majority opinion.

Related: Supreme Court Hears Missouri Scrap-Tire Playground Funding Case

The justices voted 7-2 in favor of Trinity Lutheran, the High Court announced Monday.

“This case will have profound implications for years to come,” Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Church, said in a statement.