Tax money should not fund religious schools

The Supreme Court’s ill-considered 5-4 Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue decision — requiring taxpayers to fund religious schools wherever secular private schools receive public funds — tears at the nation’s fabric in at least two ways.

First and foremost, it will force taxpayers to support religious creeds and cultures with which they disagree. Some taxpayers (atheists, gays, etc.) will even be forced to support creeds and cultures which are openly hostile toward them. That strikes directly at the heart and intent of the First Amendment. Instead of trying to create a false equality between secular and religious private schools, the Supreme Court should have recognized that they are indeed different, and should have accepted the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling.

Alternatively, the Court could have found a constitutioally acceptable route to equality by ending taxpayer funding of all private schools. (Inequality among public schools can be addressed with subsidies and assistance sufficient to equalize education opportunities between rich and poor districts.)

Second, Balkanizing education will further divide our nation.

Faced with a flood of conflicting misinformation from the internet, too many people have given up on trying to figure out what is objectively true, and now rely on their own internal biases to inform their concept of reality. Those who think in terms of conspiracies gravitate toward conspiracy “news.” Those who think in terms of apocalypse gravitate toward coming-apocalypse “news.” Those who think in terms of opposition to government gravitate to anti-government “news.” Etc.

Reality is up for debate, and that situation can only be made worse by making tax revenues available to religious schools. Different religions make different claims about reality, and indoctrinating more students into these differing versions of reality, with less counterbalancing, secular education, can only contribute to social chaos. It’s very likely that christian nationalists will try to exploit this decision as a way to obtain taxpayer funds to advance their “culture war.”

Once public funds are made available to religious schools, there will be calls for public oversight — not just accounting for the spending, but also oversight of the curriculum that our money buys. The public, yours truly included, will demand it. We will insist that publiclyfunded religious schools must serve the public interest, educating their students about real science, rather than creationism, comprehensive sex education, rather than “abstinence only,” secular American History and Civics, rather than christian-nation claims, fair treatment of minority groups, rather than demonizing and harassing them, and so on. Publicly funded schools are supposed to be a factor in uniting the nation, especially by teaching a consistent, standard, secular version of American History and Civics.

If the public is denied a say in what our education tax dollars are paying for at religious schools, there will be a tax revolt.