Nevertheless, the plaintiffs in Carson claim Maine is constitutionally obligated to subsidize religious education, at least so long as it provides similar funds for secular private education. Parents can still choose to send their children to an institution that seeks to inculcate those children into a particular religious faith, but they won’t receive state funds to do so. Only “nonsectarian” schools are eligible for this subsidy.
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Instead, the state offers to pay the private school tuition of those nearly 5,000 students, who would otherwise have no access to a free education. Although much of Maine operates ordinary public schools run by local school districts, some students - predominantly those who live in sparsely populated areas where there is no local school - are not assigned to a particular school. To be fair, Carson also involves Maine’s fairly unusual public school vouchers program, so it’s unclear what immediate impact a victory for the plaintiffs in this case would have in other states. One of those schools allegedly requires teachers to sign an employment agreement stating that “the Bible says that ‘God recognize homosexuals and other deviants as perverted’” and that “uch deviation from Scriptural standards is grounds for termination.’” According to Maine’s brief, both of the plaintiff families in Carson want the state to pay for tuition at schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers. Notably, the state could also wind up having to pay for hate speech in the process. The question is whether the Constitution requires the government - and, by extension, anyone who pays taxes to that government - to subsidize religious education. The plaintiffs in Carson already send at least one child to such schools. No one in Maine is prohibited from sending their children to a religious private school. It claims the state of Maine must spend existing tax revenue from its secular residents to pay the private school tuition of some religious students.
Or, an employer wishes to provide its employees with a health plan that excludes birth control in violation of a federal regulation requiring the insurance to cover contraceptive care.īut Carson is not like these cases. A church wishes to hold a crowded service, for example, in violation of a public health order limiting the number of people who can gather at one time during a pandemic. Typically, the Court’s “religious liberty” docket involves laws and policies that prohibit religious parties from acting in a way they believe is consistent with their faith. It moves the battleground from whether religious conservatives can seek exemptions from individual laws to whether they can also demand that the public actively fund their faith. “The times are different,” the plaintiffs’ brief claims, “but the result is the same: denial of educational opportunity through religious discrimination.”Ĭarson, in other words, represents a significant escalation in the war over whether the government can enact policies of which religious people - and religious conservatives on the Supreme Court - disapprove.
Under this reasoning, there is no relevant difference between denying a public education to a Catholic student and refusing to pay for private religious education. Now, according to the brief, Maine is committing a similarly repugnant sin against religious people by refusing to pay state residents’ tuition at private religious schools. “In the 19th century, Maine’s public schools expelled students for adhering to their faith,” they claim, citing one example of a Catholic student expelled for not completing lessons off a Protestant bible. Makin, a case being heard next Wednesday, December 8, begin their brief to the Supreme Court with an absolutely ridiculous historical comparison.
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