Recently Trump promised Catholic leaders that if he is re-elected, he would fund Catholic schools.
These two Christian leaders explain why that’s a terrible idea.
Valerie Strauss introduced the essay:
Late last month, President Trump had a phone conversation with Catholic leaders, educators and others, during which he promised to seek federal financial support for parochial schools to help them weather the coronavirus pandemic, according to Crux, an online website that focuses on news about the Catholic Church.
Trump also declared himself the “best [president] in the “history of the Catholic Church,” according to Crux, which quoted from what it said was an audio recording it had obtained of the call. And he promised to keep supporting issues that are important to the Catholic Church, such as opposition to abortion.
Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, have been supporters of expanding alternatives to traditional public schools, especially programs that use public funding for private and religious school education. The first school that Trump visited as president was a Catholic school in Florida in 2017, and he has repeatedly praised state programs that use public funding for religious school expenses…
The authors are Meli Barber, vice president of DignityUSA, a Boston-based organization that focuses on LGBTQI+ rights and the Catholic Church; and Charles Foster Johnson, founder and executive director of Pastors for Texas Children, an independent ministry and outreach group that comprises nearly 2,000 pastors and church leaders from across Texas.
Barber and Johnson write, and I quote only a part of their excellent essay:
By redistributing taxpayer funds to private religious schools, voucher programs threaten marginalized students, religious freedom, and public education. We are also deeply concerned about religious leaders from many traditions, including our own, who would accept or promote voucher funding for private religious schools.
As leaders in national Christian organizations, DignityUSA and Pastors for Children, we advocate for the universal education of all children provided and protected by the public. Voucher funding for Catholic schools violates this public trust.
For decades, DignityUSA has advocated for policies that respect the inherent worth and dignity of LGBTQI+ people. Public schools educate all students, in keeping with the inclusive vision of education laid out in the U.S. Constitution and Title IX. The U.S. Constitution “guarantees all people, including LGBTQ people, ‘equal protection of the laws,’” and Title IX “provides important protections to LGBTQ students.” According to the National Coalition for Public Education, directing public funds to private voucher programs could put the civil rights of LGBTQI+ students at risk.
Pastors for Children has long raised concerns about how vouchers harm religious liberty. These programs force the nation’s religiously diverse taxpayers to fund religious education we may disagree with. The differences between our traditions are crucial, and none of us should be compelled by federal or state governments to fund schools that promote religious teachings that violate our conscience rights.
I urge you to read their essay in full.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, have been supporters of expanding alternatives to traditional public schools”
Trump and his education secretary do absolutely nothing to serve students in public schools, so provide no benefit and return no value to 90% of US students and families.
In fact, Trump and his education secretary go out of their way to smear and denigrate both public schools AND public school students, by depicting all of the schools as failing and all of the students as violent, low performing thugs. They do this to promote the private schools they prefer.
This harms public school students, but the ideological agenda is so important they are more than willing to throw 50 million public school students under the bus to promote it.
Our students are poorly served by these adults. We should think about hiring some people who support public schools and public school students. One would think that would be a minimum requirement for the job, but apparently standards are so low we’re paying thousands of public employees to do nothing for our students.
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“U.S. Department of Education
#ClassOf2020: We know this isn’t the senior year you expected. You put in the hard work & rose to the challenge. There may be no stage, no standing shoulder to shoulder w/ your fellow grads – but know we are with you, cheering you on and proud of how far you’ve come. You did it!”
What are they celebrating here? Who is this for? Is this for the public school students the US Department of Education consistently depicts as low performing failures?
Is this for the public school students the ed reform “movement” sneeringly refers to as attending “government schools?” They want to congratulate our students? For what? According to the ed reform movement they’re all failures.
I really wish they’d just stick to promoting the schools and students they prefer and leave our kids out of it completely. If they can’t contribute anything positive- and they apparently can’t- perhaps just don’t use our kids as political props.
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One of the more noxious themes on the ed reform Right is that religious schools students have better “values” than public school students.
It’s just appalling. They’re not just arguing that all private schools are superior to all public schools- they’re arguing that the students are better.
Can you imagine the outrage if public school supporters ran around claiming that public school students were morally superior to private school students? Every ed reform lobbyist in the country would be penning outraged op eds, but because the victims of this smear are public school students no one in ed reform cares.
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“…because the victims of this smear are public school students…” Always, always the same.
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As you stated in your interview with the president of the AFT, the separation of church and state,is a prime issue.
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So, the Supreme Court is hearing a case called Espinoa v. Montana Department of Revenue. It’s about whether a state can refuse to provide religious schools with the same per pupil support (typically, seven or eight thousand per student, though this case deals with tax credits for education savings “scholarships”) that it supplies to public schools. This case is extraordinarily important because if states have to support private religious schools through vouchers or tax credits or regular per pupil transfers, there will be far more private schools and far fewer public schools.
The case will affect the definition of separation of church and state and spill over into many other areas, such as whether a business can discriminate against LBTQX persons for religious reasons. Think of it this way: do states have an obligation to use your taxpayer dollars to support private religious schools that teach intolerance of immigrants and foreigners and other religions and LGBTQX persons? Hmmm.
The new private schools resulting from this case will doubtless often be highly segregated because there is nothing to prevent private schools from having a culture and curriculum abhorrent to minority children and their parents.
The court has the votes to overturn considerable precedent by ruling for the plaintiffs.
Of course, if the justices seek justice, they will rule for public schools and the separation of church and state. But there is an alternative: they can be remembered by history for signing onto the worst decision since Plessy v. Ferguson.
Why do right-wingers want to overturn the clear precedent of separation of church and state in schooling? Well, they can read the polls. They can see that on issue after issue–guns, abortion, Medicare for all, taxes, climate change, LGBTQX rights, etc.–there is, among young people, a SUPERMAJORITY that is against them. If right-wingers don’t convert MILLIONS of young people, they are FACING EXTINCTION a generation from now. And what better way to effect indoctrination of a new generation of right-wing lemmings than to create fundamentalist Christian madrasas around the country? Doing so would also have the salubrious effects, from their point of view, of killing teachers’ unions (which are a public school phenomenon) and diverting billions of taxpayer dollars into private profits.
However, right-wingers, be careful what you ask for. For much of their history, the nation states of Europe were officially theocratic, with what our founders called “established”–by which they meant “government-sponsored”–religions. After the Reformation, there were Protestant nation states and Catholic nation states. In England, the monarch was officially the head of the church.When Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which provided the basis for the clause in Article Six of our Constitution that prohibited a religious test for office and later for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, there were those who were horrified by this Roger Williams-like call for strict separation. Would the new United States become an irreligious country? Well, precisely the opposite happened. Today, in the former theocratic nation states of Europe, religious belief is in sharp decline, and many fine churches stand empty. In the United States, with its wall of separation between religion and the state, religion flourishes, and literally thousands of denominations have sprung up. Freedom is a fertile soil.
The nutcase Evangelicals sometimes, now, literally gathered around Don the Con in the now Offal Office in the now Whiter House may think they want government sanctioning of religion–the use of taxpayer dollars to fund their madrasas. But they won’t, if they are successful, end up with the Handmaid’s Tale world they so fervently pray (prey?) for. They will end up with schools full of kids pushing back against the rigidity, the stupidity, the dullness and sameness, of the official line, what with the arc of history and all. LOL.
However, in the short term (for many decades, before we arrive at that future irreligiosity) there will be much strife if the justices rule for the plaintiffs. If the justices force the country to swallow this diseased Apple of Discord, much sickness will result in the Body Politic, which is already on life support due to the autoimmune disease of factionalism. The question will arise, over and over, again and again, in other areas of public life. Will the citizens of a town be able to declare it officially Christian? Will the Church of Satan and the Wiccans and the ayahuasca churches and the Pastafarians and the Church of Bob (yes, there is such a thing) and the Church of the Dude be able to set up schools in Florida and Mississippi and demand taxpayer dollars (in the form of vouchers or direct subsidies) for those? What will the bible thumpers of Florida and Mississippi think of that?
So, there will be all these battles, further dividing us, further factionalizing us, at the very time when we are so factionalized that reasonable pundits are talking about the possibility of Civil War again in these Disunited States.
Lord help us. LOL.
This is, indeed, an extremely important decision. And its importance goes far beyond preserving public schools from the diversion of funding into private religious ones, as if that weren’t cause enough to reject this attempted overthrow of our sacred wall of separation that has for so long protected freedom of thought.
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Even if there are no new religious schools, a decision for the Espinosa plaintiffs will force the state to pay tuition at every existing religious and private school. At a time when public funding is shriveling, this will be a devastating blow to public schools. And of course public funding will flow to very discriminatory, low quality religious schools that hire unqualified teachers.
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Unqualified teachers? Why, hear at Bob’s Real Good Flor-uh-duh Skool, we have the finest teechers state voucher monie kin buy! Are HIStory classes, from the Creation to the United States of Dimocrat Babylon to the Rapshure, is taught by the Reverend Sam Smiley hisself, who has a Ph of D degree from the Living Word Correspondance Skool. And are marksMANship clases is taut by a dril instructer sertified by the Miniteman Patriot Militia! And Bob’s girlfriend Darlene, who wrote the curriculems, is a graduate of Trump University. Enuff said!
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My favorite Florida moment: The Orlando Sentinel revealed that nearly 200 voucher schools openly discriminate against LGBT students, families and staff. When a legislator proposed a bill to ban such discrimination, the Republican majority flatly rejected it. They welcome and approve discrimination!
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Yes. Sickening!!!
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This is a good essay. It would seem that the powers that lie behind the Post-Falwell political bent of American fundamentalism would understand the history of Williams and Anne Hutchinson, another Puritan dissenter. But they do not. Historical truth is a casualty in the present culture wars. It has come home to historians in a casket that had its flag stolen.
For some of us who spend some of our week in pews truth matters as a matter of conscience. Alas! It seems that is no longer a quality associated with those who would use the pews. Even Cal Thomas, with whom I never agreed, decried the corruption inflicted on religion by its involvement in the political process. There is a Beer hall over in Germany where Dr. Faust supposedly met the Devil. Where did modern fundamentalism have this meeting?
In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo has Marius voice his own opinion that evil lies in the vagabondage of young men. The fundamentalist movement can ignore the less fortunate if it wishes to do so, but it does so at all of our risk if that group continues the modern influence out of proportion to its numbers. Ignore a large part of society, and the vindication of the ignored will see someone besides white people walking through our statehouses with guns. I do not want to be around.
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Both Democratic and Republican campaign strategists appear to agree that the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will likely determine the 2020 presidential outcome.
Media report that Republican operatives have initiated geofencing in the Catholic churches in the three states. It was a tactic first employed by Steve Bannon.
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Insight into conservative American religion –
“The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists”, The Nation.com 2-3-2020
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