Peter Greene worries that the Espinoza decision is another step in the movement to establish the principle that the public should fund religious schools. He believes this is ominous.

I don’t disagree. That’s why Trump and DeVos celebrated the Court’s decision that all state scholarships for private schools must include religious schools. I was pleased that the Court did not take the final step that would completely eliminate any state bans on funding religious schools. That would have the public pay for thousands of religious schools, as well as ersatz religious schools, of meager or low quality. They left open the future disposition of cases that test the legitimacy of state constitutional prohibition of paying for religious school tuition. This underscores the importance of the 2020 election and of ousting Trump. No more justices who would destroy public education.

Greene begins:

The Supreme Court has, as expected, poked another hole in the wall between church and state; it will weaken public education and open the door to making taxpayers foot the bill for religious discrimination.

Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue has further extended the precedent set by Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, a case that for the first time required “the direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church.” Historically, the free exercise clause of the First Amendment has taken a back seat to the establishment clause; in other words, the principle was that the government’s mandate to avoid establishing any “official” religion meant that it could not get involved in financing religious institutions, including churches or church-run private schools.

This has been a big stumbling block for the school voucher movement, because the vast majority of private schools that stand to benefit from vouchers are private religious schools. In fact, where school vouchers have been established, they are overwhelmingly used to fund religious schools.

But for several years, conservative fans of school choice (including Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) have been pushing the argument that a religious school is not free to exercise its religious faith if it does not get to share in taxpayer dollars. The wall between church and state has thus been characterized as discrimination against religion, and as conservatives celebrate this decision, they repeatedly characterize it as a blow for freedom. Turns out you can’t be really free without taxpayer funding.

There are a host of problems with the SCOTUS decision and the arguments behind it.

For one, the freedoms that private religious schools wish to enjoy include the right to discriminate. Choicers like to argue that vouchers make families free to choose, but private schools are free to reject students for any reason they choose. Investigations found that Florida’s robust voucher program funnels millions of dollars to schools that reject or expel LGBTQ students and faculty. Because Florida imposes little accountability on its private schools, the Orlando Sentinel also found private schools teaching about the happy co-existence of white owners and Black slaves in the pre-Civil War South as well as how men and dinosaurs once lived together.

For taxpayer dollars to flow to private religious schools, one of two choices has to be made. Either private schools retain their freedom to operate as they please, or they are accountable to taxpayers for living under the same rules as a public school. The former opens up the possibility of students being taught ideologically based falsehoods, even as taxpayers fund schools to which their own children would not be admitted. The latter means that private schools would trade a financial windfall for a loss of autonomy, maybe even have to accept some of Those Peoples’ Children in their private school. Sometimes we forget that the wall between church and state was also meant to protect the church; when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.