The Supreme Court Majority Seeks to End Separation of Church and State

The extremist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court holds the concept of the separation of church and state in contempt.   This contempt was made obvious in the Court's ruling that compels the state of Maine to fund tuition for parents seeking to enroll their children in right wing Christian" schools.  To the majority, anything that restricts right wing Christian parents from using taxpayer funds to indoctrinate their children is "discrimination against religion."  Of course, one has to wonder if the outcome would have been different had the parents bringing the lawsuit against the state had been Muslim and had been seeking to enroll their children in fundamentalist Muslin schools (personally, I supect the result would have been different).  Sadly, the current majority on the Court wants to have an established religion notwithstanding the Constitution's prohibition and steadily the favoritism to one brand of Christianity is inching toward a defacto estatblished religion.  The rights of tthose of other faiths or no faith simply do not matter and the Court's majority wants all taxpayers to be forced to fund one toxic form of religion.  I suspect, things will only get worse.  A piece in The Economist looks at the Court's ominous ruling:

In 1785 James Madison warned against taxing Virginians to pay salaries for teachers of Christianity. Requiring citizens to hand over just “three pence” to fund religious instruction, he admonished, is a dangerous “experiment on our liberties”. On June 21st, 237 years later, the Supreme Court has come out against the chief author of the Bill of Rights—and Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a “wall of separation between church and state”—in a dispute over a tuition-assistance programme in Maine.

The result in Carson v Makin is no surprise. The writing has been on the wall since 2017, when the Supreme Court ruled that public grants for cushier playgrounds must be open to secular and church-based preschools alike. Three years later, the justices said states may not exclude schools from an aid programme just because they have a religious affiliation. But in Carson, the court took a further, significant step.  . . . . the state offers tuition assistance to parents who wish to educate their children in private—but not sectarian—schools. Carson requires Maine to scrap that caveat and extend the offer to schools with explicitly religious missions and curriculums.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, lamented the imbalance in the majority’s treatment of the First Amendment’s twin religion clauses. Free exercise and nonestablishment exert “conflicting pressures” on states seeking to respect individual belief while not unduly merging religion and state, Justice Breyer wrote. But the Carson majority “pays almost no attention” to the latter while “giving almost exclusive attention” to the former.

“The Court today”, Justice Breyer wrote, “nowhere mentions, and I fear effectively abandons”, the “long-standing doctrine” that states may erect a taller church-state wall than the constitution requires.

Justice Sotomayor’s solo dissent added a touch of “I told you so.” The court “should not have started down this path five years ago”, she wrote, reflecting on her dissenting vote, along with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in the 2017 case. The ensuing “rapid transformation” of religious liberty, she concluded, has led America to a point where “separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation”.

I continue to believe religion - and the hatred, violence and discrimination it causes - is one of the great evils of the world.