226 STEVENS, J., dissenting We might wish, along with Senator Gorton, that Congress had chosen a better term to effectuate its purposes. But our own efforts to articulate "public forum" analysis have not, in my opinion, been altogether satisfactory. See Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense & Ed. Fund, Inc., 473 U. S. 788, 833 (1985) (STEVENS, J., dissenting).1 Lawyers and legislators seeking to capture our distinctions in legislative terminology should be forgiven if they occasionally stumble.18 Certainly ator Levin for special attention not because his views are of unique importance, but because his remarks were quoted by the Court of Appeals. Ibid. Still odder is the Court's own use of Senator Levin. The Court quotes the Senator as saying, "The pending amendment will allow students equal access to secondary schools student-initiated religious meetings before and after school where the school generally allows groups of secondary school students to meet during those times." 130 Cong. Rec. 19236 (1984). The Court emphasizes the word "generally." This word, however, puts Senator Levin in square opposition to the Court's reading of the Act. I agree with the Senator that the Act authorizes meetings by religious student-initiated groups in schools that permit meetings by student groups in general; the Court, however, must show that the Act authorizes such meetings even in schools that have a less generally open forum, one defined specifically enough to exclude partisan ideological organizations. Senator Levin's statement does not help the Court. Nor can the Court claim any assistance from the reservations expressed by Senators Chiles and Denton about the legislative history, ante, at 243: When their remarks are considered in context, it becomes immediately apparent that both men were addressing specific problems completely unrelated to the Act's connection with Widmar. 17 See also Farber & Nowak, The Misleading Nature of Public Forum Analysis: Content and Context in First Amendment Adjudication, 70 Va. L. Rev. 1219, 1223-1225 (1984); L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law § 12-24 (2d ed. 1988). 18 The Court would have us believe that the step is not a stumble but a pirouette: The Court declares that any possible interpretation of the Act must concede that Congress intended to draw a subtle distinction between a "limited public forum" and a "limited open forum." Ante, at 242. For the reasons given in n. 15, supra, I find this suggestion implausible: The drafting of this legislation was not so finely choreographed. Moreover, this Court's own opinion in Widmar refers, in quick succession and without apparent distinction, to "a forum generally open to the STEVENS, J., dissenting 496 U.S. we should not hold Congress to a standard of precision we ourselves are sometimes unable to obtain. "Our duty is to ask what Congress intended, and not to assay whether Congress might have stated that intent more naturally, more artfully, or more pithily." Sullivan v. Everhart, 494 U. S. 83, 106 (1990) (STEVENS, J., dissenting). II My construction of the Act makes it unnecessary to reach the Establishment Clause question that the plurality decides. 19 It is nevertheless appropriate to point out that the question is much more difficult than the plurality assumes. 20 public," 454 U. S., at 268; "a generally open forum," id., at 269; and “a public forum," id., at 270. The District Court opinion in Bender-an opinion of great concern to Congress when it passed this Act-observed that "a university which accommodates student organizations by making its facilities 'generally open' for their meetings will have created a 'limited' public forum." 563 F. Supp., at 705. In the same month the Act was passed, the Court of Appeals' opinion in Bender closed the circle by using "limited open forum" to describe the First Amendment status of both the college forum in Widmar and the high school forum in Bender. Bender v. Williamsport Area School Dist., 741 F. 2d 538, 547, n. 12 (CA3 1984); id., at 550. It would be wrong to say that the Court today slices these distinctions too thin: There is in fact no distinction for the slicing. Even were I to accept the Court's premise, however, it would not lead me to the Court's conclusion. It does not seem that a "limited open forum” would be, as the Court must suppose, narrower in scope than a "limited public forum." Dictionary definitions, which the Court seems to favor, point in the opposite direction. 19 We consider Establishment Clause questions under the three-part analysis set forth in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612-613 (1971): "First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion, . . . ; finally, the statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion."" (Citations omitted.) 20 The difficulty of the constitutional question compounds the problems with the Court's treatment of the statutory issue. In light of the ambiguity which it concedes to exist in both the statutory text and the legislative history, the Court has an obligation to adopt an equally reasonable con 226 STEVENS, J., dissenting The plurality focuses upon whether the Act might run afoul of the Establishment Clause because of the danger that some students will mistakenly believe that the student-intiated religious clubs are sponsored by the school.21 I believe that the struction of the Act that will avoid the constitutional issue. Cf. NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, 440 U. S. 490, 500 (1979). 21 The plurality also considers briefly, and then rejects, the possibility that the Act may lack the "secular purpose" required by the Establishment Clause. See ante, at 248-249. In my view, that question, too, is closer than the plurality suggests. There is no doubt that the purpose of this Act is to facilitate meetings by religious student organizations at public high schools. See, e. g., 130 Cong. Rec. 19216 (1984) (statement of Sen. Denton). There would nevertheless be no problem with the Act if it did no more than redress discrimination against religion. See Corporation of Presiding Bishop of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. Amos, 483 U. S. 327, 338 (1987) (characterizing as "proper" the statutory "purpose of lifting a regulation that burdens the exercise of religion," even if the resulting exemption does not "come packaged with benefits to secular entities"). Under the Court's reading of the Act, however, Congress had a considerably more expansive purpose: that of authorizing religious groups to meet even in schools that prohibit assembly of all partisan organizations and thus do not single out religious groups in particular. The Act also authorizes meetings of political or philosophic as well as religious groups, but it is clear that Congress was principally interested in religious speech. Ante, at 239. The application of Lemon's secular purpose requirement to the Act thus becomes more complicated. When examining this issue, the plurality quite properly recognizes that we must distinguish between religious motives and religious purposes. See ante, at 249. The plurality, however, misapplies the distinction. If a particular legislator were to vote for a bill on the basis of a personal, religious belief that free speech is a good thing, the legislator would have a religious motive. That motive would present no problem under the Establishment Clause. If, however, the legislator were to vote for the bill on the basis of a prediction that the resulting speech would be religious in character, then the legislator would have a religious purpose. That would present a problem under the Establishment Clause. It is, moreover, entirely possible that this religious purpose might exist even absent a religious motive, as would be the case if the legislator's only reason for favoring religious speech was a belief that it would tend to produce cooperative behavior and so reduce the crime rate. It is the latter, not the former, kind of religious intention that is at issue here. As such, the plurality's STEVENS, J., dissenting 496 U. S. plurality's construction of the statute obliges it to answer a further question: whether the Act violates the Establishment Clause by authorizing religious organizations to meet on high school grounds even when the high school's teachers and administrators deem it unwise to admit controversial or partisan organizations of any kind. Under the plurality's interpretation of the Act, Congress has imposed a difficult choice on public high schools receiving federal financial assistance. If such a school continues to allow students to participate in such familiar and innocuous activities as a school chess or scuba diving club, it must also allow religious groups to make use of school facilities. In analysis of Lemon's purpose requirement presupposes that having a religious purpose for enacting a statute becomes analogous to having a religious motive for enacting the statute whenever the statute confers some incidental benefit upon secular activity. With this I cannot agree. To survive scrutiny under the Lemon test, it is not enough that a statute's sponsors identify some secular goals allegedly served by the Act. We have held that a statute is unconstitutional if it "does not have a clearly secular purpose," Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 56 (1985), or if its "primary purpose was to... provide persuasive advantage to a particular religious doctrine." Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 592 (1987). A law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in school classrooms is not vindicated by the possibility that reading it would teach students about a "fundamental legal code," Stone v. Graham, 449 U. S. 39, 41 (1980), and a law requiring recitation of the Lord's Prayer is likewise not saved by assertions-true or not-that such a practice serves the "promotion of moral values, the contradiction to the materialistic trends of our times, the perpetuation of our institutions and the teaching of literature." Abington School Dist. v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 223 (1963). In sum, the crucial question, under the purpose requirement of the Lemon test, is whether the challenged statute reflects a judgment that it would be desirable for people to be religious or to adhere to a particular religion. The plurality is correct to observe that it is irrelevant whether the legislature itself behaved religiously when it made (or abstained from making) that judgment. The plurality's observation, however, is likewise irrelevant to the question before us. The Act may nevertheless comply with the purpose requirement of the Lemon test by encompassing political and philosophic as well as religious speech, but that conclusion requires more explanation than the Court provides. 226 STEVENS, J., dissenting deed, it is hard to see how a cheerleading squad or a pep club, among the most common student groups in American high schools, could avoid being "noncurriculum related" under the majority's test. The Act, as construed by the majority, comes perilously close to an outright command to allow organized prayer, and perhaps the kind of religious ceremonies involved in Widmar, on school premises. We have always treated with special sensitivity the Establishment Clause problems that result when religious observances are moved into the public schools. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578, 583-584 (1987). "The public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools. ..." Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Ed. of School Dist. No. 71, Champaign County, 333 U. S. 203, 231 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). As the plurality recognizes, ante, at 251, student-initiated religious groups may exert a considerable degree of pressure even without official school sponsorship. "The law of imitation operates, and nonconformity is not an outstanding characteristic of children.” McCollum, 333 U. S., at 227 (Frankfurter, J., concurring); see also Abington School Dist. v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 290-291 (1963) (BRENNAN, J., concurring). Testimony in this case indicated that one purpose of the proposed Bible Club was to convert students to Christianity. App. 185. The influence that could result is the product not only of the Act and studentinitiated speech, but also of the compulsory attendance laws, which we have long recognized to be of special constitutional importance in this context. Id., at 252-253; Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38, 60, n. 51 (1985). Moreover, the speech allowed is not simply the individual expression of personal conscience, as was the case in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School Dist., 393 U. S. 503 (1969), or West Virginia State Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943), but is instead the collective statement of an organiza |