A recent article in the Morning Sentinel reported, “A federal lawsuit is once again challenging Maine’s limits on sending public money to religious schools.”
The discrimination argument the plaintiffs are using now is the opposite of their previous argument. One commentator on the above article summed up the plaintiff’s argument by writing: “Previous arguments claimed that treating religious schools differently than public schools wasn’t fair. Now that the state applied Maine’s Human Rights Commission educational guidelines equally to public and private schools, the current argument is treating religious schools the same as public schools isn’t fair. The goal is not equality or fairness; it is public funding of Christian schools.”
Will Christian nationalists ever learn that the separation of church and state protects everyone’s freedom of and from religion, and that without it no one would have either? The answer is no! Christian nationalists do not want freedom of religion for everyone; they want a license to discriminate against anyone’s human rights whenever it serves their purpose. They want to allow businesses to refuse service to anyone who offends their religious beliefs. They want to deny women their right to choose. They want public funding of Christian schools, and they want to deny the LGBT community their human rights.
The Morning Sentinel article correctly reports that public funding for private schools began in reaction to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that racially integrated schools. The aim then was to discriminate against Black students. Now the drive to fund Christian schools is being done with the aim of discriminating against LGBT students.
The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday reveals that the real reason for the suit is to force public funding for a license to discriminate against LGBT students. The plaintiffs argue that Maine discriminated against religious schools when they applied the state human rights act to public and private schools. The plaintiffs claim that forcing them to respect everyone’s human rights makes them “ineligible to receive public money because of their religious practices and teachings, including those related to sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Maine did not make religious schools ineligible; religious schools are making themselves ineligible. All the schools need to do in order to qualify for state funding is respect human rights.
However, the state is wrong in one respect; it only require schools that receive public funds to respect everyone’s human rights. Regardless of the funding source, every school should be directed to honor everyone’s human rights. Otherwise, your human rights depend on those who choose to honor them.
However, public funding of Christian schools is not the Christian nationalist’s end game; taking over the nation’s entire education system through vouchers is. The recent Morning Sentinel article reports that funding private schools with public taxes has skyrocketed in recent years. As Robert Enlow of EdChoice, a pro-school choice organization, said, school choice programs have increased in number greatly over the last decade. What’s more alarming is that Oklahoma approved the nation’s first religious charter school that is independently run but funded by taxpayers.
Furthermore, when the federal Charter Schools Program proposed new rules preventing private, for-profit charter schools from receiving public grant money and requiring them to report their finances if they receive any public funds, the lobbyists for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) opposed those regulations.
NACPS wants for-profit charter schools to get public grants and state taxpayer funds without having to report how those funds get spent. This will leave each state with zero financial oversight of what state-funded charter schools do with public tax dollars. The same is already confirmed in Maine. The state pays private schools $56 million annually and has zero oversight over how those funds are spent.
The Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin does not require Maine to fund Christian schools. The court ruled only that if Maine chooses to fund private secular schools, it must also fund private religious schools. However, Maine does not have to decide to fund private schools at all, secular or religious.
The position of the Maine Chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation is to encourage the state to end funding for private schools. Doing so will allow the $56 million given away to private schools annually with no accountability to be put back where it belongs in Maine’s public school system. This will be a huge step forward in providing every child in Maine with a fully funded and high-quality public education school system.
Tom Waddell is vice-president of the Maine Chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He welcomes comments at vice.president.tw@ffrfmaine.org and ffrfmaine.org
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