If all citizens have to pay for religious schools, then religious schools shouldn’t have the right to discriminate against them either.
A. Tell me about it. A year and a half of that just about drove me from teaching.
B. So?
But the solution to all of that was mentioned above: Let the Church of Satan open an academy in the “densest” area affected. Get some billionaire with a puckish sense of humor to subsidize it and offer state-of-the-art instruction. Then step back and watch the fur fly.
You may be interested in the case of Fulton v. Philadelphia, discussed in this older thread:
Just substitute the Catholic charity with a Catholic school, and foster care referrals with school vouchers.
~Max
I’m not sure I understand your point here. Your solution to this is “sucks to be a rural student, we’ll just let them get a really substandard education”? So: that’s bad.
The Blaine Amendment was rooted in anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment in the 19th century.
So is the next step tax rebates for home schooled children?
I think I’m in favor. In the long game, I’ve given up on educating Republicans out of their stupidity. The dumber they are the easier it will be to stop them overthrowing our democracy.
I edited out a paragraph on my doubts that a rural school in backwoods Maine would offer a quality education in the first place. Then thought better of it but forgot to fix the preceding lines. Mea culpa.
All recent evidence to the contrary aside, you mean?
The Satanic Temple is a joke religion. It only exists to troll religious hypocrisy, and isn’t going to follow through on establishing an entire school just for trolling purposes.
The people who pursue these court cases know this. Nobody on the liberal/sectarian side cares enough about the issue to throw that much money at it, especially given that their policy preference is for public schools over private schools.
Don’t mistake me, I’m not a fan of this decision, nor of privileging private schools at all. It just gets endlessly tiresome to hear people ominously say “wait until the shoe is on the other foot”, with no real concept of whether the other foot even exists.
This whole concept is so foreign to me. Everywhere I’ve lived schools have been set up by local governments, which in rural areas means county-level school districts. School funding is provided by local taxes, but is supplemented by the state.
It’s honestly never occurred to me that a county wouldn’t set up a public school district, and so I don’t know what the repercussions of that should even be. I feel like public schools need to be available everywhere, and if the county refuses maybe that responsibility then falls on the state? But the state isn’t really set up for that, and it means that counties could basically “opt out” of funding their schools knowing that the state would pick up the tab.
Which… kinda seems to be what’s happening here? I guess I agree with the ruling insofar as if nobody is going to actually step up and make a school system, then, well, beggars can’t be choosers. If a church is the only organization willing to actually educate a community, then fine, fund them. But… christ, how did we get to this situation where the citizens of Maine are paying for rural communities that can’t be arsed to do whatever rural communities do all over the country.
Hard cases make bad law is an ancient adage. “The phrase means that an extreme case is a poor basis for a general law that would cover a wider range of less extreme cases.”
The Maine case was extreme. The circumstances as far as I know are unique to Maine. This Court has a history of allowing exceptions of states granting funding to religious schools to make practices equal. In fact, the decision mentioned two previous cases this court decided. In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer the church school was denied a grant to purchase recycled tires to resurface playgrounds and lower courts approved. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue the issue was a tax-credit scholarship program, and the lower court sided with the state. When overturning, The Court first noted that the Free Exercise Clause “protects religious observers against unequal treatment” and against “laws that impose special disabilities on the basis of religious status.” That was an obvious precursor to this decision. And it makes nonsense of any claim that the Blaine Amendments have been suddenly overturned.
The state not funding religion should be an absolute core principle of a secular American government at all levels. My take on the Maine case was that the Court should have ruled that the state find a way to make public schools accessible. Distance has been overcome many times in many places. But this Court likes small cases that seem unfair to Christians because they know how popular the decision would be. And small precedents can mount up.
Fulton v. Philadelphia is a whole 'nother animal. Many religious institutions still discriminate against the LBGTQ community. This would not be a small case, it does not supply equality to a few unfortunates, and this type of favoritism is no longer publicly popular except among the extreme right. It would be equivalent to overturning Roe v. Wade another bomb on secular society. That’s the one to watch for.
Already decided, last year, in favor of the Catholics. Opinion was linked in post 3 of that thread.
ETA: My takeaway from Fulton as applied to a school voucher program is that the state may require participating schools to accept voucher students regardless of race/color/religion/creed/gender/orientation; however, if any official has discretion to provide an exception to the rule, an exception must be granted for any participating school that claims accommodating a protected class of students violates the school’s free exercise of religion.
~Max
Sorry. I was in a hurry to finish and just stuck in the last paragraph without checking. That’s always a mistake.
No Satanic schools that I know of. But there have been several instances of conservative legislators and pundits expressing outrage when other non-Christian religious schools (Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist) have sought government funds that were granted to Christian schools.
Why, some of those schools might not even teach their students that God wants them to vote Republican. And what kind of religious education is that?
Yes, the way to make conservative evangelicals regret this ruling is much simpler and much more commonplace than Satanic Temple schools. It’s madrasas.
Unconstitutional, inconvenient, potato, potato…
Yep. That’s the way to go.
Sometime today I heard about a case in Florida involving a Jewish school who’s suing DeSantis. The commentator seemed to think the case would possible disrupt this ruling pretty hard. Let me see if I can dig it up.
There was a story recently about a synagogue suing Florida over abortion restrictions, arguing that it violates their religious rights.
Yes, I think that was it.