Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District by Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber

Abstract

Reviewed by: Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District by Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber Gabrielle M. Girgis Disability Rights and Religious Liberty in Education: The Story Behind Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District. By Bruce J. Dierenfield and David A. Gerber. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 248 pp. $27.95. This book tells a story that will serve scholarship in many fields. It also resonates with my personal experience. As a hard-of-hearing Catholic, I heard echoes of my life in the story of Jim Zobrest, a deaf young man whose parents fought—all the way to the Supreme Court—to have his interpreter in a Catholic high school funded by the local public school district. Historians Bruce Dierenfield and David Gerber offer a meticulous account of the Zobrests' life. Special attention is paid to a dilemma facing Jim's parents, Sandi and Larry: whether to send him to a school for the deaf or disabled, or enroll him instead in a standard school with accompanying speech therapy and sign-language interpretation. In choosing to "mainstream" Jim, Sandi and Larry departed from a growing capital-D Deaf culture, which sees deafness as a cultural identity, and celebrates its isolation from the hearing world. As the authors show, hard questions about how to raise and teach deaf [End Page 110] children were tragically overshadowed by the Zobrests' legal dispute over the public funding of services for Jim at a religious school. Countless interviews with the Zobrests and others give a moving picture of the challenges facing parents of deaf and hard-of-hearing children then as now. The authors transition seamlessly from the Zobrests' early decisions about Jim's education to the Supreme Court case at the book's center. In Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (1992), the Zobrests argued that under disability rights law and the Constitution's guarantee of the free exercise of religion, the local public school district had to continue paying for Jim's sign-language interpreter even after he began attending a Catholic school. The school district argued that this public funding would amount to an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The Court sided with the Zobrests. Although the authors' work is chiefly historical—an effort to retell the story with accuracy and rich detail—their scholarship raises questions that could bear fruit in law, disability studies, philosophy of education, and political theory. To take one example: Dierenfield and Gerber's careful description of competing perspectives in the litigation highlights a common dispute in establishment-clause cases. The question is about how much a law's incidental effects should matter. The Zobrest majority held that a neutral disability rights law creates no unlawful establishment if it simply aims at equal services for disabled students in secular and religious schools alike. By contrast, the school district, and the Court's dissenting justices, concentrated on the law's effects: if the state is de facto paying for Jim's interpreter to sign the content of all his classes—including doctrinal statements in a theology class (e.g., "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and died for our sins")—then the First Amendment's prohibition of religious establishments has been violated. The authors admirably try, but occasionally fail, to tell the Zobrests' story with impartiality. They are forthright about their interest in the issues raised by the case and remind us that it's nearly impossible for the historian to have no feelings about the outcomes she reports. But a subtle bias against the Zobrests' choice to mainstream their son appears in the authors' language and selections of detail. For example, their account of a conversation between Sandi and a school district representative portrays Sandi as a highly emotional woman prone to outbursts of anger, and the representative as a calm and pleasantly rational male. And in a litany of Jim's school's failures to support him, we hear the implication that Jim's young life in the mainstream is a tragedy, in which he was always the victim, never a protagonist. [End Page 111] The book also presents Jim's parents as...