Mercedes Schneider offers a history lesson on the Blaine amendments found in most state constitutions, which require that public money go only to public schools. Some states–like Indiana–have found creative ways to interpret the Blaine amendment, by saying that the public money goes to parents, not to religious schools, but most states continue to interpret the amendments as they were written in the late 19th century.
What is a Blaine amendment and who was James G. Blaine? Schneider explains.
James G. Blaine voiced the strong anti-Catholic sentiment of his era, a sentiment shared by many other elected officials. He tried and failed to get an amendment to the U.S. Constitution barring the spending of public funds on religious schools. But most states incorporated his language, reserving public money for public schools.
Some have argued that the religious bias behind the amendments should invalidate them, but the fact that these amendments have been on the books for about 150 years makes a challenge seem improbable.
However, a challenge is in the wings. The wealthy, successful schools of Douglas County in Colorado (where a radical faction of the community won control of the school board) adopted a voucher plan; the Colorado Supreme Court said it violated the state constitution in a 4-3 decision. The district announced it would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Colorado Attorney General sides with the district. The possible addition of Neal Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court would strengthen the case for vouchers, because Gorsuch is known for his strong views defending religious freedom, which in this case might mean public support for religious schools.
The case is called Douglas County School District v. Taxpayers for Public Education. Thus far, it has not been certified for appeal. Keep your eyes on this one. It could be the one that deals a knock-out blow to separation of church and state. Or the Supreme Court might pass it by, for now.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
According to ProCon.org, there are 310 Religions and Denominations in the United States.
How can public support (taxpayers from all those religions and even those people who don’t belong to any religion) for religious schools be seen as religious freedom?
For instance, that would mean taxes from the almost 30 million American nonreligious/secular, agnostic and atheists (and everyone else who isn’t a member of the Christian Right) would end up paying for the Alt-Right to send their children to schools that teach creationism, flat-earth theory, and polluted water and air is clean water and air.
Does that mean the Chrisitan Alt-Right would be willing to pay taxes to support private sector corporate Charter schools that are Jewish, or Islamic, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Unitarian Universalism, or neo-Paganism, or Wiccan, or Spirutalism, or native American Religous, or Bahaism, etc.
Even Scientology has 55,000 members, or what about the 33,000 that belong to Druidism.
http://undergod.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000068
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Q How can public support (taxpayers from all those religions and even those people who don’t belong to any religion) for religious schools be seen as religious freedom? END Q
Federal and State governments provide funding to religious institutions, to provide non-religious services all the time. Example: An HUD grant to a church to build a homeless shelter.
Federal/state money goes to students at the university level, that the students use to pay tuition and fees at religious institutions of higher learning.
My favorite example: If a Baptist gets SNAP (Food stamps) to purchase kosher beef and halal (Islamic-blessed) lamb, at a food pantry operated by Catholic charities, whose religion is being supported by the taxpayers?
The first amendment addresses two things: Establishment of religion, and free exercise of religion.
Providing financial support to a non-profit institution (even one operated by a religious group), to provide services, is not establishing a religion.
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Charles,
I do not believe that public funds should be used to subsidize K-12 religious schools. I used to think so, but then I realized what a nightmare this would be. There are dozens of different religions in this country. The great role of the public schools has been to teach children of many religions and backgrounds to live together, work together, and understand one another. This is a great gift. This prepares young people for the real world, not to live in a bubble with others just like themselves. Most Americans (about 70%) oppose vouchers for religious schools
That’s all I will say on this subject.
You have said the same thing over and over for about 30 or 40 or 50 comments. Please stop.
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Charles: It’s a long term project for which such funding, coupled with the money siphoned away from public schools, and with the loss of public oversight and accountability, the long-term view IS to establish religion–one religion–and that a brand of evangelical Christianity supported by legislators who have attended nothing by religious ‘academies” all the way through college.
Paraphrasing organizations that support, and are supported by, the Devos family, and those who have been the focus of Green’s reporting here, the stated desire is to put Betsy Devos’ or the religious right’s style religion (some of which is oddly anti-Catholic) at the center of public and educational life in the United States, by mandate.
Using the “choice” metaphor, the collective “we” can do that; but that’s not the same as “our” having been snookered into having no other “choice” because everything-education has been “vouchered” and chartered away and as choosing public school, as it becomes, is the least-good option, if it still exists at all.
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Do you share a similar opposition, to the providing of tax subsidies to students attending vocational/technical schools, which are operated by religious institutions?
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Catherine: Do you have any supporting documents or websites, which support your assertion? Do you sincerely believe that the coalition of school-choice supporters, which include Catholics, Protestants, and even atheists, wish to establish a state-financed religion in the USA? I would like to see this!
Many people who use vouchers, redeem them at Catholic schools. In some places, like New Orleans, most of the voucher attendees at the Catholic schools, are not Catholics.
With the spreading of Islam in the USA (now the third-largest religion in the USA), voucher recipients will be redeeming vouchers at Madrasses. Will these voucher recipients, be in support of a state-financed Christian evangelical religion?
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Charles: Regarding references about the systematic and long-term intention of many on the religious right: Below is a note previously posted here (Feb. 13) with links, in part from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC):
The below is quoted from two sections of the report on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center about the Council for National Policy (CNP see their website) where Betsy Devos’ father was president for two multi-year periods.
The Leaders and Money
“The CNP founders, including then-Moral Majority leader Tim LaHaye, were a colorful cast of characters: oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, a one-time member of the John Birch Society’s ruling council and a billionaire before he went bankrupt as a result of his effort to corner the silver market; T. Cullen Davis, a multimillionaire from Texas who was tried and acquitted in two separate murder cases; William Cies, a wealthy John Bircher and major CNP funder; and Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. . . .”
“Those are not the only wealthy people associated with CNP. Its past presidents, in particular, include many extremely well off businessmen. Among them are Nelson Bunker Hunt; Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway whose net worth was estimated at $5 billion in 2012; and Foster Friess, a stock picker who was recognized in 2011 for contributions exceeding $1 million to the right-wing funding apparatus started by brothers Charles and David Koch. Friess is notorious for throwing himself an almost $8 million birthday party and saying on TV that women used to avoid pregnancy by putting a Bayer aspirin “between their knees.”
Read more at the below site:
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/05/17/council-national-policy-behind-curtain
The Council for National Policy: Behind the Curtain …
http://www.splcenter.org
The Council for National Policy, a highly secretive group, is a key venue where mainstream conservatives and extremists mix.
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Churches and the religious schools they control are already supported by the public as a common good: they pay neither property nor fed/ state/ local income taxes, and in many cases are exempt from other costly laws such as ADA, unemployment comp, NLRA. So church members not only have freedom to practice their religion, the public supports them to do so.
Access by all to “free” education is also provided by the public as a common good, supported primary by local taxes, w/assists from state & fed taxes. It is at minimum an equal public good to religious practice. For religious schools to claim a per-pupil piece of this pie via voucherism– thus undermining the financial viability of public schools– is to my mind beyond the pale.
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New Federal data, released on the 62d anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, is showing that America’s public schools are re-segregating. With neighborhood schools, children will only be attending schools, in their own neighborhoods, and interacting only with children from their same socio-economic group.
What does this new phenomenon do to Q The great role of the public schools has been to teach children of many religions and backgrounds to live together, work together, and understand one another. END Q ?
see
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/05/17/on-the-anniversary-of-brown-v-board-new-evidence-that-u-s-schools-are-resegregating/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.4c63b59e8e58
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Charles,
I think you are saying you want to embrace segregation, while those of us who lived it want to fight it.
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Charles: I didn’t read your Washington Post article yet, but will. However, that’s why bussing came about. It also suggests that the problems are not only in the schools, but also why the neighborhood schools and libraries are the VIBRANT LINK (holding all sorts of potentially creative intersections) between (a) concrete families, geographical places,and times that are familiar to the child mind (neighborhoods), and (b) all sorts of ideas and groups that they can learn about and associate with.
Some do this better than others–but again, starving the beast is on the agenda of many in power: public schools at least looking like they are “behaving badly” is are part of the Orwellian plan.
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Q I think you are saying you want to embrace segregation, while those of us who lived it want to fight it END Q
I am saying no such thing. Don’t shoot the messenger, who brings bad news. I read this article yesterday, in the WashPost. I found the article to be both interesting and disturbing.
I was born in 1954, the year of Brown. I have attended integrated schools all my life. I was in an interracial marriage. I am not a racist, and I do NOT want to see a return to white and “colored” schools. No way.
Louisville KY (I was born there), is going to dismantle their crosstown bussing and magnet school program leading to a return to segregation.
I want you to explain to me, how assigning children to a school in their own neighborhood, as almost all public schools now do, will enable the children of these neighborhood schools, to interact with children from other neighborhoods, and socio-economic groups, different than their own?
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I am delighted that you selected the WashPost article for the blog. The topic is important. Schools are quietly becoming more segregated.
This is a sad development.
With this neo-segregation, how can public schools meet the goal of introducing children to other ethnic and socio-economic groups?
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Bravo, Lloyd. I cannot wait for the religious right to watch a voucher go to a school where they promote Islam or Wican beliefs.
The difference between schools getting money and Charles point about SNAP is that one feeds and the other influences. In the years following World War II when the GI bill sent vets to various colleges, the colleges had a healthy respect for all approaches to religion. Today radical approaches to all religions make the separation of church and state more vital to our desire to,avoid the days when a Catholic government killed thousands of Hugenots in France. When political leaders commit atrocities in the name of religions, it debases both.
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A case is coming up before the Supreme Court on April 19, to determine if a state government can provide shredded tire chips to a church-operated playground, for the children’s safety. No religious purpose will be provided by the tire chips.
How do you feel about this case?
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Diane not sure if you have seen this article.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/this-is-your-brain-on-poverty/
On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:01 AM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “Mercedes Schneider offers a history lesson on the > Blaine amendments found in most state constitutions, which require that > public money go only to public schools. Some states–like Indiana–have > found creative ways to interpret the Blaine amendment, by say” >
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Diane: In the posted examination of the Blaine Amendment is this statement: “Some have argued that the religious bias behind the amendments should invalidate them, but the fact that these amendments have been on the books for about 150 years makes a challenge seem improbable.”
AND . . . the argument about the presence of religious bias behind such laws is misconstrued–and it’s Oh-SO-COMMON to Catholic and Protestant thought, especially evangelicals. Briefly, the FREEDOM OF RELIGION is misconstrued in some minds to mean RELIGIOUS BIAS.(It’s the same argument with abortion, though there are some differences: Freedom of an individual to abort is commonly misconstrued as “pro-abortion.”)
For the Blaire Amendment, it’s a conflicting point, to be sure. And there is no dearth of religious bias out there in our culture. However, That’s where the misconstruing occurs: That is, the problem is in the failure to recognize (or give a hoot about) the shift of power that occurs in a secular democracy from (a) religious or political authority (from-above) to (b) the freedoms of the individual (from-below).
That shift from over-authority to democratic freedoms is the flash-point of the tension–and not religious bias that is (in their view) “built-in” to amendments like the Blaire Amendment.
Many seriously religious and really good people see their own religious freedoms encroached upon, when in fact in such cases, they are not.
It’s the same problem for the oligarchs, like that congressman in Texas who reminded those students that 66 percent of tax money came from small businesses.
In either case of funding for religious schools, or the 66 percent of the funding for public schools–those who pay taxes haven’t really understood that TAXES ARE TAXES and don’t belong to them any more, except insofar as, like everyone else, they participate in the well-being, common goods, and freedoms of all concerned.
The fact that a law has been on the books for a long time is not going to hold much water in today’s Trumpian environment. The more foundational argument comes from an understanding of the whole idea of a secular democracy and the freedoms, including religious freedoms, that we all want to preserve.
My guess is that those many pastors in the Midwest who are pushing against a breakdown of secular democracy–THEY would understand the above quite well.
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Post-SCRIPT to my note: “. . . those who pay taxes haven’t really understood that TAXES ARE TAXES and don’t belong to them any more, except insofar as, like everyone else, they participate in the well-being, common goods, and freedoms of all concerned.”
ADDED: This is also where PUBLIC EDUCATION fits in; and it’s why in public schools as institutions we can teach ABOUT religion, for instance, as historical, and where we follow the field content, standards, and tenor of the empirical fields of study, like math and literature, etc.
But those PUBLIC institutions cannot evangelize for a particular or exclusive religious affiliation, nor can they teach their own “scientific” standards apart from the hard-won and long-term fields’ methods. They cannot teach atheism or nihilism as the only view either (though in either case, I am sure we can find examples of abuses).
What’s at stake with the the loss of PUBLIC education and its funding is no small thing–in fact, it’s everything, even the value and significance of RELIGIOUS FREEDOM itself. They might not know what they are doing to their own freedoms and ours, but that doesn’t absolve them of the responsibility for doing it.
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“My guess is that those many pastors in the Midwest. . . ”
Ummm, no, Catherine, those pastors are not just in the Midwest. The fundamenalist xtian dominionist thinking is strong throughout the country. It doesn’t matter where ignorance as shown by faith-belief systems of “religiosity” manifest, it’s that manifestation (or should I say infestation) of faith-belief systems (religions) against which the founders of this country attempted to quash/hold at bay knowing full well the death and destruction the 100 year European wars of religious sects brought about.
I almost wish it would be limited to the Midwest, but unfortunately it’s not.
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Duane, as the Pastors for Texas Kids proves by its actions, there is still a very strong group of faith leaders who support separation of church and state. DeVos is from a small but noisy sect of Dominionists.
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And historically the separation of church and state was promoted by many church leaders, especially in the early 1800s. Back then they realized the positives of not entangling the church (which the main one at the time in doing so, historically speaking, was the Catholic Church which most mainstream Protestant churches abhorred).
The current cast of fundies are quite a different breed. Yes, there are some religious leaders who properly understand the church/state separation (see those Texas pastors you mention), but the noisiest, who have been at it since the 70s and who publicly state they want a state religion (as long as it is their version of course) have been quite successful at getting Americans to believe that their faith-beliefs are the one and only ones. And that we should be embracing their beliefs as part of the “gubmint”. Those dominionists are not as small as it appears you believe.
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Duane E Swacker: . . . both/and.
But in defending your argument, please don’t miss my point that there is an argument with a misconstrued assumption going on in the narrative about the Blaire Amendment–about collapsing the difference between, on the one hand, encroaching on religious freedoms and, on the other hand, religious institutions encroaching on EVERYONE’s freedoms as such.
When we have a culture where education can only be had by attending a private religious-affiliated school, and where there are a multitude of such polar “choices” and affiliations . . . well, . . . think if the Middle East and its untenable conflicts. There certainly ARE problems with secular culture that most religious people are well aware of; but at least HERE, as religious people, we still can worship as we want, participate in public space, and feel relatively safe–though of course that’s also changing.
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Can’t disagree with “certainly are problems with [parts of] secular culture” and would add “as much as with [parts of] religious culture.”
And both are good reasons to keep the Blaine amendments in the states’ constitutions that have them and even add one to those that don’t instead of trying to get rid of them as the case “under consideration” by the Supreme Court (just waiting for the next ultra right judge).
As I have stated previously somewhere: “The day this country elects a dark-skinned transgendered or non-gendered atheist is the day we will truly experience liberty and freedom!”
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DUANE E SWACKER I appreciate completely what you are saying, but I am pointing to a whole other thread–where a group of pastors are pushing against what you seem to be talking about. I don’t have the link here–but will look for it and post it later.
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Even though some evangelicals want us to turn into a theocracy, I doubt this idea will catch on in a country that is so diverse with many disparate religions. Religious affiliations are on the decline in most parts of the country, and even many Christians would oppose the establishment of a state religion. We do, however, see some courts allowing religion to justify discrimination. With these types of decisions, we are opening Pandora’s box as it opens the door to marginalization of the LBGT communities and women’s rights.
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retired teacher– “Even though some evangelicals want us to turn into a theocracy, I doubt this idea will catch on in a country that is so diverse with many disparate religions.”
I am not as sanguine as you on this. I think we blue bi-coastal elites need to sit up & take notice, & fight this on every front. Tho your/ my region may seem “diverse w/many disparate religions”, there is an enormous Bible Belt in the US, & they have acquired political power via Dixiecrats subsumed into Rep Party, & now Tea Party; they have had vote-getting reps like Santorum, Pence, Cruz, & were significant players in Trump’s election.
Those liberals/ seculars/ atheists who are lulled into complacency & inaction by their local bubble– or worse, who suck their thumbs & won’t play [politics] because Dems aren’t ‘progressive enough’ [as opposed to becoming activists] will be sitting ducks for the onslaught.
Our evangelical brethren are coming from the same place as the Muslim fundamentalists. They sense their fortressed ghettoes being assailed by alien philosophies propelled by global forces– in the ether (on the internet & cable TV), via immigration into their communities, & via the very economic forces [the gubmint] which propel their kids out of their increasingly-poverty-stricken regions toward liberal hubs of employment.
We libs need to get our mojo back. I suggest a reading of “Submission” by Michel Houllebecq.
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“Our evangelical brethren are coming from the same place as the Muslim fundamentalists.”
Exactamundo!
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Additional info:
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