The Supreme Court says students seeking religious training can be denied state scholarships. It's not clear what that means for Florida's voucher program.

TALLAHASSEE - In a case that could have reverberations for Florida's school voucher debate, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states can deny public scholarships to students pursuing religious vocational training.

The 7-2 decision came in a Washington state case filed by a minister-in-training who was denied a state scholarship. Washington, like Florida and 35 other states, has provisions in its state Constitution that prohibit public funds from being spent on religious programs.

The majority of justices rejected arguments that the exclusion of divinity students from participation in Washington's "Promise Scholarship" program violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment guarantee to free expression of religion.

But what long-term impact the ruling will have in Florida was unclear Wednesday because the ruling said a state has a right to exclude religious-based funding but appeared to narrowly tailor its decision to funding for divinity school students.

So both sides in an ongoing lawsuit over Florida's voucher program claimed victory.

Ron Meyer, attorney for a coalition of civil rights groups and the Florida Education Association that is suing Gov. Jeb Bush over his "Opportunity Scholarship" program, said the ruling showed "the Supreme Court recognized the ability of a state as here in Florida to withhold public funds from institutions that are pervasively religious."

But Bush and his attorneys said they were optimistic because the court noted that Washington state allowed many of the state's scholarship dollars to flow to religious-based colleges for non-divinity students.

"The court ... did not address the constitutionality of programs such as Opportunity Scholarships," Bush said in a statement.

The question is before the 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee, which has yet to rule on a 2002 decision by a Tallahassee circuit court judge in Bush vs. Holmes that the state's voucher program violates Florida's Constitution by funnelling state funds to religious institutions to train students.

Leon County Judge J. Kevin Davey said Florida's Constitution is "clear and unambiguous" in prohibiting public funds from going to religious institutions: "No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."

Lawyers on both sides speculated Wednesday that the Florida appeals court was awaiting the federal decision in Locke vs. Davey before moving forward. Oral arguments in the case were made nearly a year ago.

The Washington case has been closely watched nationally, with President Bush entering the case on behalf of Davey.

The Washington program awards scholarships on the basis of academic merit and financial need to students who attended accredited colleges in the state, including those with religious affiliations. But it excludes students who pursue degrees in devotional theology.

The case was named after Gov. Gary Locke and Joshua Davey, who studied religion at Northwest College, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. He did not become a minister, deciding instead to attend Harvard Law School.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, said the case involved two pillars of the U.S. Constitution - the freedom of expression and the church-state separation specified in the First Amendment, and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment - that are "frequently in tension."

"Yet we have long said that "there is room for play in the joints' between them," he wrote.

Rehnquist wrote that the program does not violate free-expression clauses because it "imposes neither criminal nor civil sanctions on any type of religious service or rite. It neither denies to ministers the right to participate in community political affairs ... nor requires students to choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit."

Rather, the chief justice wrote, "The state has merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction."

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the dissenters, found that reasoning unpersuasive. "The indignity of being singled out for special burdens on the basis of one's religious calling is so profound that the concrete harm produced can never be dismissed as insubstantial," Scalia wrote.

"Let there be no doubt," he wrote, "this case is about discrimination against a religious minority."

Wednesday's ruling overturned a decision by the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

- Information from the New York Times was used in this report.