Well written; my only quibble would be that you sort of buried the lede. "Critics of vouchers fail to distinguish between a direct subsidy for religion and a tax-funded entitlement distributed to citizens who may use that entitlement for religious purposes," is really the key sentence.
While I am glad the court ruled this way, I would raise the experience of Grove City College as a warning to private religious schools accepting vouchers. GCC found that the government considers any and all subsidies to students to constitute government funding of the school itself, and thus grounds for regulation of the school. Effectively Grove City stopped even accepting student loans after the government claimed that gave them the right to enforce whatever rules they wished. Private schools and school choice advocates in states lucky enough to have private school voucher systems should keep an eye out for such behavior, and seek legislation preventing the state from using the existence of voucher programs to make private schools conform to the dysfunctional norms of public institutions.
I think you subtly misdescribed what the Court’s ruling was. It didn’t just rule that it’s ok for the state to allow voucher use for religious schools; it ruled that the state is prohibited from implementing a voucher program that singles out religious schools for exclusion.
Unfortunately, the establishment clause (which does not use the term "separation of church and state") has more often been defined as saying that the state may not legally take any action that benefits "the church." This would have been a ludicrous interpretation if ever posed to any of the authors of our Constitution, and I doubt that it is very often made in good faith.
If anything, our current interpretation serves only to do the exact opposite of what the establishment clause was created to do - it virtually establishes non-religion (which, as we all know, very often takes on every bit the religious devotion and fervor as any mainstream religion) as the religion of the State.
Our supreme court could do a lot of good by taking us back to the intended meaning of the establishment clause.
In a previous post in reference to labor laws, you said:
"It would be strange, then, to claim that you have an enforceable duty to not offer a *bad* job to that person—an offer that they can of course reject and be no worse off compared to a situation where they had no offer [...] If you are permitted to offer no job (or no gas or whatever), you should be permitted to offer a low-wage job (or high-priced gas)."
I'm wondering how you reconcile this view with the position outlined in this post, that IF the state decides to offer school vouchers, the vouchers must not be allowed to have any stipulations about their usage.
Well written; my only quibble would be that you sort of buried the lede. "Critics of vouchers fail to distinguish between a direct subsidy for religion and a tax-funded entitlement distributed to citizens who may use that entitlement for religious purposes," is really the key sentence.
While I am glad the court ruled this way, I would raise the experience of Grove City College as a warning to private religious schools accepting vouchers. GCC found that the government considers any and all subsidies to students to constitute government funding of the school itself, and thus grounds for regulation of the school. Effectively Grove City stopped even accepting student loans after the government claimed that gave them the right to enforce whatever rules they wished. Private schools and school choice advocates in states lucky enough to have private school voucher systems should keep an eye out for such behavior, and seek legislation preventing the state from using the existence of voucher programs to make private schools conform to the dysfunctional norms of public institutions.
I think you subtly misdescribed what the Court’s ruling was. It didn’t just rule that it’s ok for the state to allow voucher use for religious schools; it ruled that the state is prohibited from implementing a voucher program that singles out religious schools for exclusion.
Unfortunately, the establishment clause (which does not use the term "separation of church and state") has more often been defined as saying that the state may not legally take any action that benefits "the church." This would have been a ludicrous interpretation if ever posed to any of the authors of our Constitution, and I doubt that it is very often made in good faith.
If anything, our current interpretation serves only to do the exact opposite of what the establishment clause was created to do - it virtually establishes non-religion (which, as we all know, very often takes on every bit the religious devotion and fervor as any mainstream religion) as the religion of the State.
Our supreme court could do a lot of good by taking us back to the intended meaning of the establishment clause.
In a previous post in reference to labor laws, you said:
"It would be strange, then, to claim that you have an enforceable duty to not offer a *bad* job to that person—an offer that they can of course reject and be no worse off compared to a situation where they had no offer [...] If you are permitted to offer no job (or no gas or whatever), you should be permitted to offer a low-wage job (or high-priced gas)."
I'm wondering how you reconcile this view with the position outlined in this post, that IF the state decides to offer school vouchers, the vouchers must not be allowed to have any stipulations about their usage.