Wednesday, June 22, 2022

For the Record: Prayers and Thoughts


A really awful Supreme Court decision handed down today in a church-state case from Maine, where a private-school voucher program to compensate for the lack of public high schools in rural areas forbade funding for "sectarian" schools in which religious instruction was part of the program:


Actually, it's Roberts's distinction:

In 2017, he wrote the opinion that said a state could not exclude a church from a Missouri program that provided support for safety measures at playgrounds. That decision was narrow enough to draw support from liberal Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan. In a footnote, it said the ruling addressed only “express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing,” and not “religious uses of funding.”

Which he has now walked back:

Roberts wrote in Tuesday’s ruling, “Maine’s decision to continue excluding religious schools from its tuition assistance program … promotes stricter separation of church and state than the Federal Constitution requires.”


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