Not the Most Even Discussion of Winn

I do not know who Jacques Berlinerblau is , [Editorial amendment: what I should have said was, since Mr. Berlinerblau is writing specifically about Religion Clause doctrine, I don't think I've read anything written by Mr. Berlinerblau dealing with the law of religious liberty before, but perhaps I've missed it.  I did not mean at all to imply that my not knowing someone's writing is itself problematic (except, of course, for me).  That would be a silly thing to say.  I fully expect that Mr. Berlinerblau has not the first idea who I am.] but I guess he writes things for the Chronicle of Higher Education and he obviously has very strong feelings about the decision in Winn.  It seems that he believes that the decision signals the overthrow of the enlightenment -- the one inaugurated in the 1960s and 1970s, he says -- and ushers in a new age in which government may violate the Establishment Clause at will. 

However one might feel about the jurisprudence of the Warren and Burger Courts (and whatever the author means by the "secular judicial consensus" that obtained in that mythical golden age), this seems a rather apocalyptic reading of a relatively narrow ruling decided on a technical, non-Establishment-Clause-related issue.  The reading of precedent, and of Flast in particular, is unfortunately crude: whether the Flast exception applied in a case like this is not answered by the simple one-liner that Berlinerblau just knows that it is.