For Immediate Release: June 21, 2022
Contact: Paul Fidalgo, Communications Director
[email protected] - (207) 358-9785
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) decried the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision today in the case of Carson v. Makin, describing it as a green light for state funding of fundamentalist religious academies.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court, ruled that Maine’s system of funding public education, in which the state pays for children to attend private schools in rural areas without a public school, violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by excluding explicitly religious schools.
“Taxpayers in Maine, whether they are atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or any other faith, will now be forced to pay for children to be indoctrinated with religious viewpoints they reject and may even find abhorrent,” said Nick Little, CFI’s vice president and legal director. “Religious institutions have found another way to pick taxpayers’ pockets, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution is powerless to prevent it.”
This decision stands as part of a series of rulings by a Supreme Court increasingly hostile to church-state separation, shattering the central and well established understanding of the First Amendment that the government cannot fund religious activities out of the public purse. In Trinity Lutheran, the Court ruled that Missouri must allow public funds to be used by a church to resurface its children’s play area; in Espinoza, it invalidated a Montana prohibition on school scholarships funded by tax credits being used to pay for sectarian schools. In this decision, Chief Justice Roberts pushed things further, making clear that the law did not care whether the funding would be used for religious purposes, including the religious instruction of children.
“The Founders established the Wall of Separation between religion and government to prevent people being forced to subsidize faiths they did not believe in,” said Robyn Blumner, CFI’s president and CEO. “The Roberts Court claims it hews to our founding principles yet it is actively dismantling Thomas Jefferson’s wall. Now, with this ruling, the power of the state may force Americans—about one third of whom subscribe to no religious faith—to foot the bill for children’s religious education and indoctrination.”
Rulings by this Supreme Court have also made clear that religious groups cannot be excluded from receiving public funding because of discriminatory views and actions nor can they be required to follow anti-discrimination employment laws.
“Atheist taxpayers in Maine, and soon many other states, are going to be forced to fund schools that teach that evolution is a Satanic lie, and that the earth is 6,000 years old,” continued Little. “They will be forced to subsidize education that separates boys and girls into different classrooms with different curricula. They will be compelled to bankroll schools that teach prejudice against gay, lesbian, and transgender students and that human life begins at fertilization. The guarantee of a secular, public education that has done so much to give children of all religious backgrounds exposure to one another and their shared American heritage, is being gutted by an increasingly theocratic Court.”
CFI joined an amicus brief in this case, which can be read here.