(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
SCOTUS Will Make Religious Schools Publicly Funded [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-25
That's my prediction.
This is how the Supreme Court will do it. Step by step.
The Republicans have been talking about it a long time.They've tried to put reading and discussing the Bible into public schools' curriculum. They've tried to put the Ten Commandments on the walls in classrooms. Now they want the public to fund their private religious schools.
The push has been to give parents school vouchers so they can use the money to go to the school of their choice for their child. Linda McMahon, if she gets confirmed for Secretary of Education, is going to be pushing for it no matter what the Supreme Court does.
It's whether Oklahoma must publicly fund the first religious charter school in the country.
The Justices said they would review an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision that invalidated a state board's approval of an application by the Catholic Church in Oklahoma to open a charter school. The case will be probably argued in late April and decided by early summer. Amy Coney Barrett is not taking part in the case, and did not explain why.
Last June, Oklahoma's top Court held by a 7-1 vote that a taxpayer-funded religious charter school would violate the part of the First Amendment that prohibits government for making any law "respecting an establishment of religion."
That seems to be pretty obvious to anybody who has a brain. The problem is that the Supreme Court has decided to hear this case. With the court's conservative makeup, they could snatch something out of thin air to make it possible. They already figured out how to do it with presidential immunity.
The Supreme Court already made a 6-3 ruling in 2022 that Maine can't exclude religious schools from a program that allows for tuition aid for private education. That could allow religious organizations to get taxpayer funds.
We saw the start of the Supreme Court going in the direction of religion with the football coach who was allowed to pray at mid-field after games, with players who wanted to.
In the Maine decision, Justice Roberts found that the school program violated the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom. It's a balancing act to take that, and then deal with the prohibition of recognizing any religion.
"Maine's 'non-sectarian' requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise," Roberts said.
The three liberal justices dissented saying that the decision was tearing down the wall between the separation of church and state.
Justice Breyer stated that there was a "constitutional need to avoid spending money to support what is essentially a teaching and practice of religion."
So, the Supreme Court has already shown a preference for diverting public money to private religious schools. Robert said that states are not obligated to finance private schools, but if they do, they can't exclude religious schools.
Maine is mostly rural. So there's great distances between schools. The program to allow money to go to private schools was to deal with the location problems, not to specifically prioritize private schools. You try to fix one problem, and you get another.
The Oklahoma case is a different story. The school in question is called St. Isadore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.
When I saw "Virtual School", I had to go take a look at their website to be sure. Sure enough, they don't have a building, it's all online. It's open to all students in Oklahoma, and says it's tuition free. If they're running it as a tuition free school, why do they need taxpayer money?
At the top of their webpage, they thank the Supreme Court for taking on the case. Below that, they talk about the Oklahoma Supreme Court decision and how disappointed they are, and that because of it, they can't operate a 2024-2025 school year.
It would seem to me that the Catholic Church would have plenty of money to operate the school all by itself. Who is giving them all the money for the lawyers that they've used, from the first trial court to the Oklahoma Supreme Court and now to the Supreme Court?
Here's the Supreme Court docket for it. Case number 24-394. The case doesn't read like I thought it would. It's the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Gettner Drummond, Attorney General of Oklahoma.
The case puts Oklahoma's Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, and it's Republican Attorney General, Gettner Drummond, on opposing sides. Stitt favors the school. Drummond reversed the advice given to the Charter School Board by his Republican predecessor, warning that the Catholic charter school would, in his view, violate the Constitution.
I get even more confused because NBC News says that it's a religious law clinic that's representing the school. Then they say that it's called the Alliance Defending Freedom. It's not a law clinic.
These people are not nice people. They purport to help people, but look at the cases your money (donations) would support.
Dan and Jennifer Mead. They're suing the school district that secretly tried to socially transition their daughter. Bryan and Rebecca Gantt. Pastor Bryan and his wife Rebecca are faithful foster parents whose foster care license was revoked because they would not comply with a Vermont policy requiring them to promote gender ideology.
First off, you know that no school district does anything in secret and certainly wouldn't transition a child. They're making it up. It's like Trump saying that your child goes to the school one day and comes back a different gender. There is no Vermont policy saying you have to promote gender ideology. They're making that up, too.
The firm has been doing this for 30 years. Who knows what they've been doing in all that time. This case obviously did not come up 30 years ago. Whatever you give them will be matched by a grant that can go up to $500,000 a month. I wonder how much they pay themselves. They say they win 80% of their cases and that they've won 15 in front of the US Supreme Court. Their offices are a suite in a building in Washington D.C. They are not hurting for money. Back to the case.
There are 12 parties to the case. It's a rather impressive list. Reading the names of the organizations, I think they're all on the side of the school.
When the Supreme Court decides to take a case, they come up with questions they think need to be answered by the case in order to come up with a decision. These are what they asked this time:
1. Whether the academic or pedagogical choices of a privately owned and run school constitute state action simply because it contracts with the state to offer a free educational option for interested students.
Pedagogical is an adjective meaning related to teaching.
2. Whether a state violates the Free Exercise Clause by excluding privately run religious schools from the state's charter-school program solely because the schools are religious, or whether the state can justify such an exclusion by invoking anti-establishment interests that go further than the Establisment Clause requires.
They preceded those questions with summations of precedent from other cases.
"This court has 'repeatedly held that the state violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.'"
"Contrary to those precedents, the Oklahoma Supreme Court held that a state can exclude privately owned and operated religious charter schools from its charter school program by enforcing state-law bans on 'sectarian' and religious affiliated charter schools. The court also held that a charter school engages in state action for constitutional purposes when it contracts with the state to provide publicly funded education. These rulings implicate an entrenched circuit split and present two questions for review."
No one could read the precedents and the questions, but to come up with the conclusion that the Supreme Court is going to rule for St. Isadore of Seville Catholic Virtual School represented by the Charter School Board.
"Repeatedly held."
We did it before, we're going to do it again.
"Contrary to those precedents."
Stare decisis. Precedent. This is the court that set those precedents. Wrong before, but now they can use them to allow making religious schools equal to any other private or public school as the recipient of public funds.
"These rulings implicate an entrenched circuit split..."
The Oklahoma Supreme Court is prejudiced against religious schools.
"Free Exercise Clause" for religious freedom. They bring it up in the precedent, and in the question to be answered. They've already given the basis for their decision. For them to do otherwise, they would be accused of being against the freedom of religion.
A bakery refuses to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Bakery wins on the basis that it violates their religious belief that says gays are an abomination to God. 7-2 decision.
Five years later with the new Trump Justices:
A website designer for weddings wants to refuse to make them for gays. Gays are against their religion. Doesn't even have an instance of having been asked. Should be no standing and dismissed. Supreme Court takes it up and rules in favor of the website designer. 6-3 decision.
The football coach that wants to pray on public property. 6-3 decision.
There are Supreme Court cases that directly affect this one. Espinosa v. Montana Department of Revenue. 2018. Said that states don't have to fund private schools, but if they do religious schools have to be included. Sounds like a slam dunk for this case.
Van Orden v. Perry (2005). While the Ten Commandments are religious, they also have a historical meaning. Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious Doctrine does not run afoul of these Establishment Clause.
Carson v. Makin (2022). A state's non-secretarian requirement for otherwise available tuition assistance payments violated the Free Exercise Clause.
Supreme Court cases from 2000 and before all go the opposite direction in regards to The Establishment Clause.
The Supreme Court created the precedents for this decision. Soon, it will be allowing the Ten Commandments on the walls of public schools and Bible teaching. Not the Torah, not the Koran, just the Bible, because Christians are the religious majority. Not Jewish or Muslim schools, just Christian. The court will figure out a way to find that it isn't recognizing Christianity as a religion, when it is.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Brown will have completely valid precedents to cite from previous Supreme Courts before Roberts'. If Amy Coney Barrett is recusing herself from the case, it will still be a 5-3 decision. I can't see any other mix after previous decisions.
Donald Trump is pushing the narrative with executive orders. First the one saying there are only two sexes, male and female. He ended Biden's commission examining the Supreme Court for recommendations and reforms. There's the one "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship." Read religious freedom of speech tops all else. The Supreme Court could cite it in the religious school decision. We didn't do it, the President made us do it.
Even the "Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government" could used as, wait for it, a weapon. Saying that courts are biased against religions, read Christianity, and so is the Justice Department. Trump just shut down the civil rights division of DOJ, for example. Look for any cases involved appearing to be against religious freedom to be dismissed, and ones trying to get the religious freedom to be prejudiced, prioritized.
Even the one ending all DEI programs in the whole federal government could be used as a cudgel against DEI's supposed tactic of "canceling" people of faith.
The Supreme Court could cite all of these executive orders as justification for ruling in favor of the online Catholic Church school. This just gives them another excuse to do what they obviously already plan to do.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/25/2298993/-SCOTUS-Will-Make-Religious-Schools-Publicly-Funded?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
