Let’s examine why Saudi Arabia’s Islamists are so aroused over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling by June that using public money to fund religious madrassas is perfectly fine. The court took on the case last week from Oklahoma, where an online Catholic school, St. Isidore of Seville, but really more of 7501 NW Expressway in Oklahoma City, across from Home Depot and the Mattress Firm Clearance Center, sued after it was denied a charter and tax dollars.
The outcome is foretold on a court that interprets English rather like J.P. Morgan wanted his lawyers to interpret the law: “I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.” Let there be might: in the holy hands of our college of cardinals (six of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic, five of them nominated by Republicans sent by God), “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” becomes “shall make no law preventing a preference for religion,” preferably Christian.
Wahhabism, interchangeably identified with Salafism, is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is the most puritanical, uncompromising form of Sunni, or any, Islam, though like the ayatollahs’ version of Shiitism, it has about as many echoes in the Koran as a clucking chicken in Azerbaijan does in the Grand Canyon. Its most familiar approximation to anything Christians might know–or long for if you’re JD Vance–is the terror regime of the Catholic church’s Medieval period.
Wahhabism considers women subhuman, forbids the public exercise of any religion but its own, executes gays, adulterers and apostates, and gave us Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Omar and Abu Yusif (the ISIS leader who never managed his 15 minutes of fame because his mass murders weren’t televised.) So Wahhabism today is closest to the doctrines of the Taliban and ISIS.
Since the 1970s and with the direct support of the Saudi regime Wahhabis launched a splurge of madrassa-building across the globe, including in the United States. Culver City, Calif., was famous for a Wahhabi school attached to the still-active King Fahd Mosque, named for the Saudi king who ruled and consorted with every American president from Reagan to the second Bush. (Notably, the mosque is funded through the Ibn Taymiyah Foundation. Ibn Taymiyah was an early and uber-Wahhabist whose sworn enemies were–naturally–Sufists, the most humane and inspiring practitioners of Islam (or any religion) you’ll know. When Islam is referred to as the Religion of Peace, Sufism is the hyperlink.)
Private religious schools have a longer tradition than public schools in the United States. Nothing wrong with that. It’s how Harvard started. Its first president was the Puritan-turned Baptist minister Henry Dunster (later fired and tried for refusing to baptise his child). Innumerable little Harvards, Muslim ones among them, dot the land, their quality of education often superior to anything public and undiminished by whatever religious frills drives the curriculum. I was raised by Jesuits. Their corporal violence, molesting perversions and doctrinal absurdities aside, they did a pretty good job. We would not necessarily want a land without religious schools.
There are limits. Our founders recognized them. One cleric’s religion is another’s cult. Anyone can with time, force or marketing conjure enough legitimacy out of any sectarian invention. It should not be the role of government to patent one and not another. The founders had a few millennia’s killing fields to suggest that staying out of the fray altogether is best.
So we got “Congress shall make no law,” the clause Thomas Jefferson cemented on American society with the great metaphor of the church-state wall. No, it’s not in the Constitution. But what’s in the Constitution is more explicit, as Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black–a stricter constructionist than Scalia or Thomas–put it in his reading of the First Amendment: “No law means no law.” That wall, he wrote, “must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”
Black wrote that line in a 1947 case from New Jersey, defending a state law authorizing the reimbursement of parents for bus fares paid by students attending either public or Catholic schools. As long as public money did not end up in the pockets of religious schools, that the payments were blind to the type of schools the students attended, and that a public benefit was the goal–in this case, the safety of students–it was legal. All conditions had to be met.
Even so, the court split 5-4. Justices Robert Jackson and Felix Frankfurter blamed the majority of “giving the clock’s hands a backward turn” by circumventing the First Amendment’s prohibition, which they said applied to a “subsidy, bonus or reimbursement.”
Keep that case in mind: Everson v. Board of Education. Come June, this Supreme Court, drawing on the kind of cherry-picking sophistry and mis-history Scalia applied to fabricate the Second Amendment’s individual right to bear arms in the 2008 Heller decision, will cite Everson as one of its precedents to defend direct payments to charter school. The court majority will simply delete some of the conditions Black required.
We’ve been on this slippery slope since the mid-Reagan years. Surely you remember the Saturday in August when Reagan triggered a Soviet nuclear alert after joking, as he was doing a sound check for his weekly radio address, that he’d signed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union, and the bombing would start in five minutes. Forgotten is his actual address, when he spoke of signing legislation to allow religious groups to use public schools to meet after hours. It seemed like an innocuous, even logical decision. But the court’s 1947 minority would not have approved for the same reason that it had dissented in the bus fare case. The Trojan horse looked unthreatening, even elegant. But there was no stopping its ultimate intentions once let in.
The assault has been relentless and fabulously successful. In 2002, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision reduced the church state-wall to something like the rustic remnants of Hadrian’s Wall when it legalized subsidizing parents’ tuition at private religious schools with public money. The swindle has since been euphemistically dressed up as “vouchers,” as if you were getting a free Pepsi at a baseball game, or by that favorite nom de guerre of the public school demolition movement, “school choice.”
Our own Paul Renner saw no reason to wait anymore two years ago when he enacted the biggest plunder of public schools in Florida’s history by taking a limited “voucher” program and opening it to any and all students. Even children of millionaires now qualify for an $8,000-per-student per-year subsidy of taxpayer dollars to attend private school or home school. No questions asked. No standards required. School districts, ours among them, have been hemorrhaging students. Fly by night schools have been mushrooming to exploit their share of the racket.
Florida, like a dozen other states and many more lining up to offer “universal vouchers,” is far ahead of the Oklahoma charter case. Justices will cite the voucher movement as another justification to extend the grace of public money to charters. What can go wrong? Now you see why Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabists are licking their chops. They don’t have to put up their own money anymore to spread their Salafism in the heart of the Great Satan’s land. They can make us pay for it.
I doubt we would be having this debate if the organization seeking public money in the Oklahoma case were not a Catholic school with a saint for a mascot but a madrassa pushing the grim tenets of Salafist Islam, a K-8 project of Central Florida Wiccan and Pagans United, or the Satanic Temple’s Florida chapter looking to open Dante’s Inferno Academy for Underprivileged Devils right next to City Repertory Theatre at City Marketplace.
But here we are. By the end of June, when the Supreme Court rules on this case, it will do exactly that, and what remains of that once sturdy and noble wall between church and state will be blown away as by a Salafist’s IED. Next up: restoring prayer in schools. In the name of the father, the son and the holy subsidies. Or as our Saudi friends would croon, Allahu Akbar.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Endless dark money says
The billionaires need wage slaves. This is what the Nazis wanted, morons are too stupid to fight back. Nazi took over america and people cheered them on as their rights were taken. Sad and shameful. Who will they kill next ?
Steve says
I’m sending my kids to the satanic temple. Learn more truth there. I’ve seen who the “ Christian’s” support and the evil they turn a blind eye to. Read what the Bible says about immigrants!
Pogo says
@A $ide note
A$ $tated
https://www.google.com/search?q=mbs+salvator+mundi+2025
Drill baby drill. To the la$t drop.
Joe D says
As much as I (and my brother ) benefited from our 12 years of PRIVATE Catholic School Education (paid for out of pocket by my blue collar parents who scrimped and saved to do so), I’m not in favor of the way FLORIDA runs their “choice” programs. There is no financial qualifications (billionaires can still qualify for an approximate $8000 taxpayer subsidy per child), there are no school standards requiring any ACCREDITING body certification …correct me if I’m wrong…(although most Catholic Schools and many expensive private school are accredited), there is no required standardized Annual testing REQUIRED to show that these private institutions (much less home schooled students) are meeting minimum grade standards. In my prior home state, your child could not remain in home schooling (no subsidies at all either way), if your child didn’t maintain grade level each year.
And then (as the article references) if you give out state tax money, you can’t limit it to Christian or elite schools (if you don’t want COURT challenges)…you have to give the $8000 to parents choosing Muslim, Wicken (witches or Naturalist religions) and the SATANIC groups who want to start their own educational programs.
Sadly, in many cases this funneling of public money, USUALLY results in a BRAIN DRAIN ( along with the financial drain) from PUBLIC schools. How many Millions of dollars were sucked out of the public school system BUDGET in Flagler County this year?
Public schools can refuse no one! So if your child has a disability, needs special education services, or has a behavioral health issue, the PUBLIC school can’t say “No!”…they MUST by LAW provide an educational program based on the needs of the child ($$$).
However (at least to my knowledge) the non public schools can refuse to enroll your “special needs” child, and just as easily expel them at will. They can essentially “cherry pick” the best and the brightest students from the Public School rolls (at taxpayers expense), leaving behind more limited students and more limited FUNDING resources to the Public School system, in the vacuum left after “choice” funds are pulled away from them.
This system (although sounding reasonable on the surface)…what parent doesn’t want a “choice?”…the long term effects are going to be poorer functioning public schools, and public funds pulled away from them for expensive “for profit,” private schools.
R.S. says
If clerically dependent, private schools are left alone to their own resources, they may produce graduates that leave much to be desired. Because a state or a nation should be able to depend on a well and responsibly educated citizenship, it is in the political unit’s interest to ascertain that schools do produce such capable graduates. The mere strict separation of funds may not yield such an outcome necessarily. I wonder whether our system ought not to change such that exit testing together with periodic intermediate testing should provide assurance of desirable outcomes with whatever school a person attends. I know that Saudi students excel in memorization; they do not necessarily excel in independent and creative thinking. State certification would have to include the teachng goal of independent and critical thinking for also the talib of the madrassa. I would have no problem if state money were to flow toward private schools, including religious schools, if the graduates were to be state certified at the end of their schooling to have reached a sound outcome.
Pogo says
@Dollars???
…yes, do tell: capital costs, operating costs, debt financing (and its backing/guarantee), bankruptcy eligibility and/or immunity — who profits, and who pays, aka, who gets stuck when the grifters abscond?
Good luck with getting a straight answer from the innumerate Republican grifters you bought these magic beans from. You’ll find them anywhere they’re protected from extradition.
ScottieV says
Why should leftist be the only one to teach our kids.As far as the tax credit for rich folks…..so what, they pay taxes too ,more than renters who have no skin in the game.Its said that some folks have no children and have paid property taxes for schools they never used for THE BENEFIT OF SOCIETY,we’ll it ait any better so let’s try something else.
Atwp says
Tax dollars being used for public schools. Will African American Students be allowed into the private schools. African Americans paying tax dollars for private schools and no doubt African American students denied attendance. Years ago African American paid taxes, they were denied entrance to public libraries, swimming pools, and possibly public parks. Just saying.
Endless dark money says
Private schools get to pick and choose who they let in……the fascist hate diversity!
Jason says
Our tax dollars have been funding the LGBTQIA+ Religion for years. I see no difference in Florida’s plan except that parents actually have a choice in what religion they get to expose their children to opposed to the religion that the teachers unions and child groomers what your kids to be exposed to.
Ask yourself why drag shows, drag story time, and all of those things seem to only happen around children or teenagers? When is the last time there was a drag show at a senior center or drag reading time at the hospital? For the same reason the military recruits at the high school because that is the TARGRT audience and demographic.
All of this opposition to public money funding private institutions seems to amazingly forget or intentionally disregard all of the public funds that finance private institutions. Why are schools all of a sudden the hill to die on for how tax dollars are spent? Could it be that most teachers in private schools are not unionized? Could it be that public teachers are scared they won’t have a monopoly on indoctrinating our children? It definitely cannot be about the tax money because billions in tax dollars are spent on private programs already and not a peep.
Intriguing…
Jason says
How is it fascist to select the students in a private school? If that’s true then every private college or even any educational institution that doesn’t accept every student that applies must also be fascist too?
Billy B says
Maybe the could do the funding with the check from Mexico !!!!!
Protonbeam says
I’m disturbed. I absolutely stupid we have become as a people and a nation. For centuries, the only schools available at all were religious schools. In fact, if it wasn’t for the Catholics or notion of school wouldn’t exist today. The most prestigious universities in the world, but let’s stick to the United States, including Harvard, William and Mary and Yale. We’re all founded as public religious institutions were the great minds such as Issac Newton, many legends of science got their education- reading the comments here and the article people have absolutely lost their minds and have become so full of heat and anti-religious dogma that their blind to the truth they’re blind to reality and they’re going to apparently would at least have the population is asking for.
Tired of it says
Drill, baby, drill? Really? Well, here is a fact for thr uneducated magas…The United States has been an annual net total energy exporter since 2019. Let me make it simple, since 2019 the US has been producing and selling more oil than it imports. Why? Because the greedy oil companies can get a bette price on the world market.
Laurel says
Protonbeam: Did you go to religious school? If so, your stamp of approval is distrubing, as I have no idea what you said in your last sentence. Those who have English as a second language do better.
The U.S. founders, and those who have lived here for generations, have not been blind, as you say. Public tax dollars paid my way through 12 grades. I want my tax dollars to pay for the general public, to go to public schools, not pay for religious teachings. It’s more of the wealthy taking funds away from the middle class and poor, and giving it to those who don’t need it.
You don’t want your children to go to public school? Opt out. Pay for religious teachings yourself. That’s the way it has been; that’s the way it should stay. Keep your personal religion in your home, within your circles of friends and within your church. Stop trying to force it on those of us who do not want it, and stop taking our money for your personal religious indoctrination.
Virginian says
Thought I just throw this in. These fascist church school do provide utility not only to the Nation but Mankind generally. See the cite below.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/two-american-teenage-girls-challenge-2-000-years-of-mathematics-with-a-groundbreaking-proof-of-pythagoras-theorem/ar-AA1yhlN4?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=01abd25141b04232d2ba995e8e60a52a&ei=113
Joe D says
Replying to RS:
I fully agree that there should be standardized testing each year for the religious, private, and home schooled students using the ~ $8000 stipend from the State of Florida. Most upper level ( expensive) private schools participate voluntarily in standardized testing each year. Most Catholic Schools participate voluntarily in standardized testing too. Newly created “private” schools (under this new State voucher program) and home schooled students are not REQUIRED to participate in standardized testing each year.
Ps:
As to the “benefit” the State of Florida gets out of the State money going to Private schools…my high school graduation class (Catholic school…paid for by my blue collar family)…had an 84% acceptance rate to college.
Smarter Children Needed says
I personally attended private,Catholic, school grades 6 – 12 and got a much better education because of it.
Private schools do hold students to a higher standard so this should make for a brighter future for all of us.
$ has to go somewhere, why waste it on public (lack of) education
Skibum says
Our nation’s free, public educational system used to be the envy of the world. I’m not convinced it is any longer, due in large part to the political right’s ever increasing sucking of dollars from public schools and transferring those funds in the form of “vouchers” to mainly religious centered private schools. Then as the quality of our public education system decreases, complaints rise, more parents want to move their children into private schools or decide to school their children at home, further reducing not only the number of students but more importantly, critical funding necessary to keep our public schools operating and attracting quality teachers. It becomes a revolving door of bad consequences that are only leading to public education in this country to be close to circling the drain. Is that what we really want??? We have to ask whether Americans really want religious centric education as the norm for our children, because as loud as the cry is against the Taliban and all that they stand for, if we continue to go down this road and completely destroy our historic, free, public education system in favor of religious education, we will become the American Taliban and give conservative religious voices even more power and control over not only our childrens’ eucation but also our very lives!
Jason says
@Joe D, all that and not a single reference to any source for some of you assertions?
I’d encourage you to research the groups that don’t support school choice. Research their leadership, look at the where their political donations go. Then ask yourself if the actions those people are engaged in are protecting a particular group of people and if altering the existing model of education is a threat to them and not actually a threat to the student.
Let’s Change It All says
I’ve long advocated for a way that “we the people” can both see how our own specific tax dollars are spent and shift funds around, like the stock market. Don’t like this stock for my 401K so I’m moving my funds here.
I’m against using my tax dollars for funding religious schools. I’m against using my tax dollars for military funding. I’m against using my tax dollar to fund congressional salaries when some of them rarely show up and do their jobs.
While we’re at it, since Social Security and Medicare will one day vanish, I would like my “loan” back that has helped fund both programs since my first job in 1994, plus interest, oh say at 10%? Why not? I’ll never see a penny of that money ever. I should have the option to freeze those dollars and have them go into my own personal savings for future living expenses for me.
Pogo says
@As usual
…Mr. Tristam, writes a lucid commentary on the virtue, tradition, and legality of compulsory public education and the Establishment Clause.
https://www.google.com/search?ACq=Establishment+Clause
Then the privatizers, generic grifters, Libertarian Party wing nuts, and Christian ISIS resistance fighters show up like ants at a picnic to confuse everything with non sequiturs and assorted variations of hide the ball, answers to questions not asked, and of course — lies.
And so it goes — way down on the Swanee river.
Pierre Tristam says
Lucky you. Lucky me. Doesn’t mean we screw it up for everybody else and return to a society where “smarter children” is a euphemism for class and wealth.
Laurel says
Jason: What’s intriguing is that you do not understand the separation of church and state, and you seem to fear that public school teachers are “indoctrinating” our children, with geography, math and English. I went to public schools, and did not experience the things you are talking about. I actually learned about civics and history, something that the far right seem to dislike. I do not want my tax dollars to be pulled out of public schools and given to private schools. You prefer religious schools to public schools, opt out and pay for it. Otherwise, the tax dollar would pay for your kids in public school.
It is about tax dollars, and Christian indoctrination forced on us. The Christians of today, are not the ones I grew up around. I shouldn’t have to fund it.
BTW, drag queens are not “targeting” children. That is total nonsense, prejudice and fear mongering.
Laurel says
Take another shot at logic. Do they teach logic in private schools?
Laurel says
Smarter Children Needed: You claim you got a much better education. I have no way of knowing that, but it does seem that they did not teach humility.
Your school should have taught you to not start a written sentence with a dollar sign.
Laurel says
Jason: I do not support public tax dollars going to private, religious schools. You can do all the research you want, and you will not find me there. I am independent, and follow no one. No religion, no party affiliation, no party promoting channel. I imagine the same cannot be said of you. Again, your logic is short.
Laurel says
You believe you will never see that money because you refuse to fight for it. You have been lied to, and you have bought it. How about trying to change it all?
R.S. says
. . . and your school should have taught you not to split an infinitive, no? ;-)
R.S. says
Good idea to know where your money goes when you pay your taxes!!! Perhaps we should know that about $200 million of our Florida taxes are buying bombs for Israel [Israel bonds] and that the US is invested in Israel with $1.7 billion. At the same time, the Muskrat and the presidential sexual predator are shuttering the Department of International Development that delivers humanitarian assistance to the poorest people of this world. Yup! We should know indeed.
Joe D says
Reply to Jason:
Comparing private high school selective admissions and college selective admissions processes are COMPLETELY different situations…. You are comparing EDUCATIONAL “apples and oranges” so to speak
Joe D says
Comment # 2 for Jason:
I would be happy to clarify my position on school choice (using public funds with little/no performance accountability), and provide references, if I knew what you were TALKING about?
Are you saying that Public School Teacher groups are the ONLY groups of voters not happy with public funds being used for private ( religious or otherwise) school tuition ( regardless of family income and without MANDATORY standardized testing of the students progress)?
I’m having a difficult time understanding the POINT you are trying to make with your comment?
Sorry…
Thanks,
Endless dark money says
It’s a total class war and the billionaires have people fighting over dumb issues while they are robbing you blind and using your tax dollars to make them richer .Deny you the people the services and regulations and institutions you need and deserve. America died because they elected savages for a dollar. Maybe we can build something better but I won’t hold my breath for it. Viva la revolution
Degrowth the hard way says
Retirement and social security? Haha even with the cold snap Jan was 1.74 C above the global average which is hotter than last year which was globally the hottest year ever! We should be well above 2 degrees by 2030 or so. 3 degrees or so almost nothing lives. Tipping points are tipping. Buckle up. Burn baby burn isn’t sustainable! Even if you want those programs to last they won’t…….oldies chose collective suicide instead of short term inconveniences.