By Alan E. Sears
President, Alliance Defense Fund
August 11, 2002
Crosswalk.com News Channel - Religious prejudice from the late 19th century provided a state judge with the rationale to declare education vouchers for religious schools to be unconstitutional.
The bigotry is found in the Florida Constitution's Blaine Amendment language, but more on that in a moment.
The Florida ruling in
Holmes v. Bush on August 5 never mentions the infamous phrase, "separation of church and state." But the ruling obviously assumes the ACLU's notion of the so-called separation of church and state. According to the judge, the Florida Constitution prohibits government "aid" to "sectarian institutions," therefore school vouchers are unconstitutional.
Carry this twisted logic to an extreme, and the state of Florida should prohibit tax refunds to people of faith. They might give an offering at their house of worship. Public assistance recipients would be prohibited from putting their "government money" in the plate. No tithing allowed! They could not volunteer their time, either. Public employees would have to be prohibited from contributing from their tax-funded salaries to religious organizations, or from serving in churches. By this logic, all such aid would be forbidden "aid" to a sectarian institution.
The Florida Constitution says "There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof. Religious freedom shall not justify practices inconsistent with public morals, peace or safety."
So far, so good. But the next sentence says "No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."
On the one hand we can say that the ruling is based on erroneous assumptions about church and state, or about who really owns tax dollars (the government or the noble citizenry that tolerates paying them). Or we might say the ruling should have held that the Florida Constitution's prohibition on "aid of any sectarian institutions" should not be interpreted more strictly than the U.S. Supreme Court interprets the First Amendment Establishment Clause.
But let us consider the problem of the language in the Florida Constitution. It would be good to remind Floridians where that language originated.
The full passage quoted above was not in the original versions but has been, for the most part, in the Florida Constitution since 1885. According to an ACLU spokesman, "the words 'directly and indirectly' were added decades ago explicitly to bar such schemes as...vouchers."
That's a nice ACLU try to gloss over the reason for the bigoted language in the Florida Constitution. The real reason is prejudice toward people of faith. The transition from last century's "School Question" to the present school conflict should be better understood. In the 1800s the tax funded "common schools" were all thoroughly religious, primarily Protestant, and dfinitely nonsectarian. To preserve this status quo in Florida and elsewhere, language prohibiting aid to "sectarian" (non-Protestant) schools was added to several state constitutions.
U.S. House Speaker James G. Blaine wanted to amend the Constitution to prohibit "any public fund" from going to "religious sects or denominations" of which he did not approve. Blaine language was code in the late 1800s for maintaining the status quo for funding the overtly religious, nonsectarian public schools, when no one imagined public schools without religion. Blain language was intended to prevent the funding of schools for the children of Southern European and Catholic immigrants. "Nonsectarian" is now the modern term for the funding status quo, i.e. people of traditional faith need not apply for vouchers.
The climate today is different, but the fight is much the same. Because children are the future, education will always be a battleground. But now conservative, traditional people of faith - including Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish groups - are fighting as allies for their liberty and for school choice. By means of its warped "separation of church and state" doctrine, the ACLU has found another battlefront against religious freedom and against this new alignment of allies. That battlefront is school choice.
An ACLU spokesman referred to school vouchers as a "money-laundering scheme" for religious people. By this ACLU logic, every artist who gets money from the National Endowment for the Arts (even for pornography) benefits from a government-sanctioned "money-laundering scheme." But that doesn't bother the ACLU. As long as it's not "money laundering" for solid American citizens who practice religion, but for "artists" who practice "free speech," it's okay.
In the movie "Gladiator," Maximus tells his cavalry that "what we do in life echoes in eternity." Blaine's legacy, which belongs to the ACLU, continues to echo for parents and children in Florida.
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