What next? - Church And State - discussion of Ohio's school voucher plan

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Edd Doerr

What next?" is the question many are asking in the wake of the Supreme Court's June 27, 2002, five-to-four ruling in favor of Cleveland, Ohio's, school voucher plan--a move that largely trashes the First Amendment. What's next is a full-scale attack on government's forcing all taxpayers to involuntarily support discriminatory sectarian schools. For example, a Baptist private school in Lexington, North Carolina, just kicked out a student allegedly for being Catholic and presumably because his parents aren't "in agreement with the Christian philosophy, purposes and standards of the school."

The new assault, the results of which cannot be predicted, will be against the clear prohibitions of tax aid to religious schools that exist in thirty-seven state constitutions and the implied prohibitions in most of the rest. Such a prohibition was invoked on August 5, 2002, when a lower court in Florida held that state's voucher plan is in violation of the state constitution.

Aiding and abetting the new assault are Harvard University Press and New York University Press, which have embarrassingly and irresponsibly published two new books that well illustrate George Orwell's remark about the "selective manipulation of history." Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State and Daniel Dreisbach's Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State raise pedantry, eccentricity, and pretentiousness to new levels. Both authors cross reference each other and set out to trash, as misleading and worthless, Jefferson's useful and accurate 1802 metaphor about separation of church and state. Neither author explains just what America's founders intended regarding church-state relations in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Both pointedly ignore the 1780s Virginia struggles that shaped thinking on church-state separation, the congressional debates on the wording of the First Amendment, and the clear intent of the post-Civil War drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Hamburger in particular attributes the state prohibitions on vouchers or their analogs to nineteenth-century nativism and anti-Catholicism, ignoring the provocations regularly pouring from the papal states and the Vatican. Both Hamburger and Dreisbach ignore such facts as that Catholic voters in New York and Massachusetts in 1967 and the 1980s defeated attempts to remove anti-voucher language from state constitutions, and that Catholic voters in California and Michigan in 2000 voted two to one against school vouchers. These authors don't mention that in 1952 predominantly Catholic Puerto Rico put into the commonwealth's constitution, "There shall be complete separation of church and state"--a constitution that was subsequently approved by the U.S. Congress. They also chose to ignore the fact that Catholic voters favored Bill Clinton who was pro-choice and anti-voucher over Republican opponents by 7 percent in 1992 and by 17 percent in 1996.

Opponents of separation also seek to manipulate public opinion. In August 2002 the media misreported the story of the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup opinion report on public attitudes toward education. They reported poll findings that public opinion opposed vouchers 52 percent to 46 percent on one question and favored vouchers 52 percent to 46 percent on another. The media didn't mention that the first question was abstract and that the second so conflated vouchers, which aren't popular, with public school choice, which is popular, that the question was essentially meaningless. The media then ignored the more significant question in the same poll, which indicated by 69 percent to 29 percent that respondents preferred "improving and strengthening existing public schools" over "providing vouchers." Significantly, that is almost exactly the same percentage as the average aggregate rejection of vouchers or their analogs in twenty-five statewide referenda from coast to coast between 1967 and 2000.

In other developments, George W. Bush (with no popular mandate) is pushing ahead with his faith-based initiative designed to have taxpayers involuntarily support sectarian charities that Christian, Jewish, and Muslim teachings generally say should be a voluntary religious duty.

In July 2002 Bush unilaterally decided to withhold from the United Nations Population Fund $34 million that had been appropriated by Congress. Bush said his action was intended to prevent China from using U.S. funds for coerced abortions. Yet, the Bush administration's own investigative team which went to China in May 2002 reported that no U.S. funds would be improperly used and urged the administration to release the $34 million. Commentators shook their heads and wondered why Bush would block family planning aid to poor countries, a move that will only increase the number of abortions, maternal deaths, and impoverished children. The answer, of course, is that Bush is playing to his religious right base.

Defenders of church-state separation will have their hands full in the days ahead.