This year, the right-wing hijacking of the Supreme Court is going to be more apparent than ever.
On June 21, the decision in Carson v. Makin (6–3 vote) sets the tone for the next two weeks. In this case, two Christian private schools challenged a program in Maine that provided tuition assistance to families in rural school districts that don’t have their own public school.
Parents could use the tuition assistance to send their children to private school, but Maine prohibited parents from using the money to attend a religious school. The rationale behind that carve-out was that the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishing a religion, so the state banned its tax dollars from going to religion.
Sounds straightforward and reasonable enough, but not to this Supreme Court. This court is now dominated by conservative Christians. Looking for exceptions from birth control mandates, anti-discrimination law, and COVID protections? How about forcing state and local governments to give you money, assistance, and support? Again, if you’re religious, you’re in luck once again.
(David S. Cohen. “The Supreme Court Just Fused Church and State – and It Has Even Uglier Plans Ahead.” Rolling Stone. June 22, 2022.)
“The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.”
– John C. Danforth American politician, attorney, diploma and Episcopal priest
The rub? The schools that asked for public tax dollar support from Maine have discriminatory admissions and hiring policies against gay and trans people as well as those who are non-Christian. If Maine is funding allows tuition assistance to go to any private school, it has to allow the funding to go to religious schools as well, even ones with discriminatory policies.
Oh, I know many good Christians will deny any “discriminatory policies”? Yes, but they know that the first clause in the Bill of Rights states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” And yet, they continue to deny that religion has been at the core of some of the worst societal and political movements in America's history.
The conservative, evangelical right as we know it today can look back at a history populated by members of the temperance movement, women's hate groups, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Branch Davidians, the Peoples Temple, Heaven's Gate, and even one very violent so-called “Christian organization” by Frank Ancona, the imperial wizard of the Traditional American Knights of the KKK.
Stop. I know what you're thinking. I'm not lumping all evangelicals with these movements, but I am pointing out that even the most well-meaning religions can use tenets to discriminate against others and seek to do others irreparable harm. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, we have separation.
(Note: Maine used to have separation, too. In 1981, the Maine legislature passed a law clarifying that families cannot use this benefit to send their kids to “sectarian” schools – which Maine’s Department of Education defines as those which teach academic subjects “through the lens of faith,” and where religious instruction forms the core of the curriculum. As a baseline, the law would prevent a student from using this money to attend a private institution which, for example, teaches that evolution is a hoax.)
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for himself and the other five conservatives on the Court (Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), explained that “a state need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”
(Note: Private schools that benefit from Maine’s tuition vouchers are largely not required to comply with Maine’s curriculum for public schools. For the most part, private school students do not need to take the same standardized tests offered to Maine public school students. And private school teachers do not need to be certified by the state, as public school teachers are in Maine. Millhiser, Vox, 2022.)
David S. Cohen – JD from Columbia University School of Law, where he was named a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, received the Public Interest Commitment Award and two Columbia Human Rights Fellowships – explains the Supreme ruling …
“What these Justices are doing is using one part of the First Amendment to the exclusion of another. The First Amendment protects freedom of religion, but it also guarantees a separation between church and state. This requires a fine balance, but as Justice Breyer notes in dissent, the court is now paying almost exclusive attention to the first part while ignoring the second.
(Note: Justice Breyer said, “The Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build.” Justice Stephen Breyer predicted that the decision would increase “the potential for religious strife.”)
“Justice Sotomayor puts an even finer point on it in her own dissent, saying that rather than being a constitutional requirement, “the Court leads us to a place [today] where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.” Stated differently, with this court, what conservative Christians want, conservative Christians get. Because apparently that’s what the Constitution requires.”
(David S. Cohen. “The Supreme Court Just Fused Church and State – and It Has Even Uglier Plans Ahead.” Rolling Stone. June 22, 2022.)
The Supreme Court has 13 more cases to decide. It typically decides all of its cases by the end of June, though it will have to rush this year to do so. Among the 13 remaining cases are many that are going to recast American society in the vision of the modern Republican party. Most prominent is the abortion case that is almost certain to overrule Roe v. Wade. In that case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, we’ve already seen the draft majority opinion from Justice Alito that obliterates not only Roe but also much of the court’s privacy jurisprudence.
"The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian Religion."
– 1797 the treaty of Tripoli, signed by President Washington, and approved by the Senate of the United States
The Agenda and Whom It Serves
Religious freedom once referred mostly to the believers' right to express religious ideas and to engage in religious practices. Now it is becoming about the freedom for individuals, store owners, or religious groups to take actions that discriminate against others by limiting other people's human rights and freedoms, without the believers incurring negative consequences themselves.
The right-wing is on the attack in schools, public libraries, and court houses all over America. Not that long ago, the Court required the government to remain neutral on questions of religion — a requirement that flowed from the First Amendment’s command that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In practice, that meant that the government could neither impose burdens on religious institutions that it didn’t impose on others, nor could it actively subsidize religion.
"Almighty God hath created the mind free; all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments of burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in His almighty power to do."
– Thomas Jefferson, Acts for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, 1785.
Carson turns this neutrality rule on its head, holding that government benefit programs that exclude religious institutions engage in “discrimination against religion” that violates the Constitution.
Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent for Vox says …
“At the same time, however, Carson also contains significant language confining the scope of this new rule. If the government cannot create benefit programs that exclude religion, then under the most extreme version of this argument, it is unclear why traditional public schools – which provide secular but not religious education – are constitutional.
“Secular public schools, after all, are government institutions that maintain neutrality toward religion. And, under the new rule announced in Carson, neutrality is unconstitutional discrimination.”
(Ian Millhiser. "The Supreme Court tears a new hole in the wall separating church and state." Vox. June 21, 2022.)
The Supreme Court is erasing First Amendment protections it doesn't like. The First Amendment tries to accomplish two basic goals: preventing the government from establishing an official religion, and preventing it from interfering with anyone’s adherence to their sincerely-held religious beliefs.
However, this new version of the First Amendment – as evidenced in the Carson v. Makin decision – not only sanctions religious institutions promoting homophobic agendas, but also requires that taxpayers subsidize student attendance. It is, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes, the latest step in the Court’s efforts “to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build.” It will not be the last.
"I hold that in this country there must be complete severance of Church and State; that public moneys shall not be used for the purpose of advancing any particular creed; and therefore that the public schools shall be non-sectarian and no public moneys appropriated for sectarian schools."
– Theodore Roosevelt, Address, New York, October 12, 1915
Adam Cohen, former member of The New York Times editorial board and former senior writer for TIME magazine who also authored Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America wrote for Balls & Strikes in November 2021 …
“One of the religious schools at the center of the case, Bangor Christian School, illustrates just how religious some of these schools can be. Bangor Christian is not merely affiliated with the Bangor Baptist Church; among its educational goals are leading 'each unsaved student to trust Christ as his/her personal savior and then to follow Christ as Lord of his/her life,' and developing 'within each student a Christian world view and Christian philosophy of life.'
“Much of what Bangor Christian considers to be religious instruction is considered by many Americans to be indoctrination in plain old bigotry. The school teaches that husbands are leaders of the household, for example, and that men are to be leaders of the church. The school also says that 'any deviation from the sexual identity that God created will not be accepted.' These are not views shared by a majority of Americans; they are, however, views espoused by the right-wing groups who have spent decades investing untold sums of money in seizing control of the Supreme Court.”
(Adam Cohen. “The Supreme Court’s Next “Religious Freedom” Case Is About Much More Than Religious Freedom.” Balls & Strikes. November 22, 2021.)
"When religion is good, it will take care of itself. When it is not able to take care of itself, and God does not see fit to take care of it, so that it has to appeal to the civil power for support, it is evidence to my mind that its cause is a bad one."
– Benjamin Franklin, Statesman, Inventor, Author, Letter to Dr. Price.
Conclusion
I pray you understand this ruling for what it is. This is part of the GOP culture war. They expect others to simply accept the results and allow their freedoms to be infringed upon without opposition or protest.
Here in Scioto County, we just had such an attempt by an elected official to silence free speech at the Portsmouth Public Library. He publicly stated that the library board was indoctrinating area children to become gay by their support of Pride month. One resident noted that the same county commissioner had attended a League of Women Voters meeting a few years before during which he gave “a very long-winded speech telling why church and state should not be separated.”
Church and support and moral judgment – don't be fooled by what may appear to be kindness. These advocates of relition are not good Samaritans acting on behalf of the public. In reality, they are angry conservatives using fear tactics to gain stronger footholds in institutions across the nation, the state, and the community. They seek to control books, curriculum, and courtrooms in their efforts to force Christian nationalism upon all. Part of their intent is to squash the LGBTQ movement in the process. They may cloak their true desires in love, but pull back the curtain that hides their conceit, and you will find political, even vengeful motives aplenty.
Let churches be churches and let States be States.
“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
- James Madison [Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]”
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