A recent New York Times opinion piece titled “The Urgent Supreme Court Case That’s Not Getting Enough Attention,” penned by Linda Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, longtime U.S. Supreme Court reporter, has a headline that should arrest the reader’s attention because it is, if anything, an understatement.
The Supreme Court case in question, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, is scheduled to be considered by the Supreme Court between April 22 and April 30. I have written about this case previously in The Christian Post, “Is a Catholic ‘charter school’ the answer?”
I was extremely concerned by the implications of this case then, and I am even more concerned now. This case breaks new ground concerning church-state issues. In this present case, the Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether “a state that allows charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools, as nearly all states do, must agree to fund those that are explicitly religious,” writes Greenhouse.
A positive decision in this case would break revolutionary new ground in the debate over separation of church and state. The school in question, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, is a proposed virtual public charter school operated and administered by the Diocese of Tulsa and the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and would, among other things, fulfill “the evangelizing mission of the [Catholic] Church.”
Ever since the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that vouchers or tax credits used by parents to help defray the costs of private education did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the aid went to the parents and they then chose whether to spend the money at a religious or a secular school.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at The Christian Post)
