Florida Shows Why Public Funds Should Not Go to Religious Schools

Roughly 38 states have constitutional provisions that bar the use of public, taxpayer funds to support religious schools.  As Florida's voucher system is demonstrating, such bans are appropriate and that taxpayer funds should not support religious and private schools that actively discriminate against different portions of the public. As noted in a prior post, Christofascists now have cases before the U.S. Supreme Court where they want such bans abolished in order for their discriminatory schools take money from the public trough while openly discriminating against whoever they deem"other" or "sinners."  The Orlando Sentinel looks at Florida's voucher system and the bigotry the public is being forced to finance.  It is instructive to keep in mind that in the South, many "christian academies" began to avoid integration and that the bigoted mindset continues to this day. Here are article highlights:

Once again, Orlando Sentinel reporters peered behind the curtains of Florida’s unchecked voucher-school system to see how $1 billion worth of public money is being used. And once again, what they found was ugly.

Their reporting uncovered more than 80 schools with blatant discrimination policies that deny admission to gay children, expel or discipline students who reveal they’re gay and sometimes refuse to educate children of LGBT parents.

These schools want public money. But they don’t want to serve all of the public.

One school told a mother — a firefighter married to U.S. Air Force veteran — that her children were unfit to be educated there simply because the couple was two women.
The two women served their country and community. But the school — which received $371,000 in state scholarship money last year — told the family to get an education elsewhere.

In their “Schools without Rules” series, reporters found voucher schools forging safety reports, using factually incorrect curriculum and hiring unqualified teachers — some who hadn’t even finished high school.

Yes, high school dropouts teaching school … underwritten with public money.

They found voucher schools that stiffed teachers out of paychecks and some that shut down in the middle of the school year, stranding students.

Berate public schools all you want. There will never be a day when you take your child to a public school only to find it’s gone out of business.

The reporters found administrators accused of fraud, teachers accused of abuse, loads of problems — all of it swept under the rug by politicians who demonize public schools while promoting “school choice.”

These reporters wanted to see what was happening in Florida’s billion-dollar voucher-school system for a simple reason: No one else will.

In six months, our reporters visited more voucher schools in Central Florida — to see what kids were learning and how they were being treated — than the Florida Department of Education visited in the entire state in a year.

Some voucher schools do great jobs. And many welcome all children, regardless of race, faith or sexual orientation. This includes some Christian and faith-based schools that not only welcome LGBT students but teach students that discrimination against anyone is wrong.

But others discriminate — not only against LGBT students, but also students with even mild disabilities.

If these kids were denied admission because they were black, it would be illegal — and politicians would be outraged.

But Florida green-lights discrimination against LGBT citizens. In hiring. In housing. And yes, in schooling.

The politicians also say people of faith should be free to discriminate if that’s part of their belief system. People used to make similar arguments for racial discrimination. In defending a 1965 ban on interracial marriage, a Virginia judge declared in 1965 that God “did not intend for the races to mix.”

Discrimination was wrong then. It is wrong now. It’s especially wrong when underwritten with tax dollars.

[S]ix months of investigating by reporters Annie Martin and Leslie Postal revealed, is that many more schools have explicit discrimination policies. And they should welcome more accountability and standards in general, to make sure children are actually being educated at these publicly funded schools — just as Florida already demands of traditional schools.

Many lawmakers are fine with the status quo and publicly funded discrimination. If you’re not, speak up.

Diverting Taxpayer Funds to Religious Schools is Wrong

It has long been the goal of religious schools to divert public tax dollars to support private sectarian schools many of which discriminate against gays and those belonging to other denominations or faiths. The Trump/Pence regime, eager to sustain the loyalty of Christofascist voters supports this diversion of public monies to discriminatory religious schools.  A case before the U.S. Supreme Court, if decided wrongly could open the flood gates for taxpayer funds flowing to such schools while allowing such schools to openly discriminate against an array of students and/or parents.  Such a ruling would clearly violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, yet the "conservative" majority on the Court may well be happy to allow taxpayer funded discrimination.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this dangerous situation.  Here are highlights:

Imagine a country where your hard-earned tax dollars must fund private religious schools that require students to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, or that expel students for being gay. Imagine that your state is forced to spend resources to help fund construction of a local house of worship of a faith you do not share, just because the state is also contributing to building a community center.

These scenarios are antithetical to the principles of religious freedom on which our nation was founded. And yet, this is the path we may be headed down as the U.S. Supreme Court gears up to hear oral arguments Wednesday in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.

The case arises out of a challenge to a Montana private-school voucher program. Because the Montana Constitution — like three-quarters of the states’ constitutions — specifically prohibits state dollars from funding religious education, the state limited its voucher program to secular schools. But some parents argued that if Montana funds private education at all, it must fund religious education. The Montana Supreme Court struck down the entire voucher program, resulting in all private schools being treated the same way: None of them get taxpayer dollars.

Now, however, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide whether Montana’s earlier decision to fund some secular schools means that it must also fund religious schools — schools that teach religion, compel students to engage in religious activities and enforce religious codes of conduct. This case is not about what a state may do, but about what it must do. To hold that the U.S. Constitution requires taxpayers to fund religious education in this fashion would upset long-standing principles of religious freedom and separation of religion and government.

No taxpayer should be forced to fund religious education. . . . Private religious schools don’t adhere to the same nondiscrimination laws that public schools do. As a result, we have seen them turn students away because their families don’t share the school’s religious beliefs. They have barred admission because a student or parent is LGBTQ or a student has a disability. They have expelled students who engage in sex outside marriage. . . . . While not all private religious schools conduct themselves in this way, too many do, and taxpayers should not have to underwrite such discrimination.

Those challenging the Montana Constitution are not seeking a level playing field. Instead, they are asking the state to fund their religious schools and continue to extend to them exemptions from laws that apply to public and even secular private schools. That is not equal treatment — it’s religious privilege.

The Christofascists continue to demand special rights and the ability to discriminate at will - even when receiving taxpayer funds.  They are a clear and present danger to constitutional government. 

Betsy DeVos' Mission to Destroy Public Education

Betsy DeVos - a study in incompetence and racism.

Long before she was nominated to be Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos was well known to advocates of quality public schools due to her efforts to push charter schools and vouchers for religiously affiliated schools in her home state of Michigan and elsewhere.  Her efforts were and continue to be part of the long history of right wing Christians trying to gut public education and shift funding to private, but mostly religious affiliated schools that could be segregated on a de facto if not official bases. Also, like most Christian extremists, DeVos has long hated public schools that emphasize the teaching of evolution - which gasp, challenges a mind dead acceptance of the Bible - versus the creationism that is so loved by the self-congratulatory "godly folk."  On Sunday evening, DeVos did an interview on "60 Minutes" which put her idiocy and racism on display for all to see.  The women is unfit for her office and has demonstrated that money - especially that earned by ones parents and/or other ancestors - or well connected parents does not equate to having brains or even common sense (voters in Norfolk's coming school board elections should take note of this reality).  A column in the New York Times looks at DeVos' disastrous interview and the ugliness it revealed.  Here are highlights:

On Sunday evening, CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview that Lesley Stahl conducted with Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary and one of the richest members of his very rich cabinet. It was overwhelmingly seen as a disaster for DeVos, who struggled to answer very basic questions. She couldn’t say, for example, why schools in Michigan, her home state, have largely gotten worse since the widespread introduction of the school choice policies she lobbied for. When Stahl asked whether, as secretary, she’d ever visited a failing school to find out what went wrong, DeVos said, “I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.”

Like many things in Trump’s administration, this performance was shocking but not surprising. Before becoming secretary of education, DeVos had never worked as an educator or a policymaker; she was a donor to education reform efforts favored by the right, such as school choice and vouchers. Her confirmation hearings last year were an embarrassment. She appeared to be unfamiliar with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, a federal civil rights law. After taking office, she described historically black universities and colleges, founded in response to segregation, as “pioneers when it comes to school choice.”

As this comment suggested, DeVos is, at best, oblivious about race. That obliviousness — or worse — is behind one of the more disturbing moments in her “60 Minutes” interview. In a sick irony, some on the right would use the recent school shooting in Parkland, Fla. . . . as a pretext to roll back civil rights protections for students of color. On “60 Minutes,” DeVos, whom Trump has chosen to lead his new school safety commission, appeared to signal she’s on board.

“The logic that people try to manufacture is that the effort to end exclusionary school discipline renders schools unsafe places,” Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights in Obama’s Department of Education, told me. “It doesn’t even bear scrutiny, really.”

But in this administration it doesn’t have to. DeVos isn’t just considering ending the policy. Speaking to Stahl, she refused to even admit that race plays a role in discipline.

Among experts, this isn’t really a subject for debate. “There’s some fairly good empirical evidence that says minority students are more likely than white students in similar situations to be written up and disciplined,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies education policy.

Stahl compared situations in which white kids are punished for classroom disruption by a trip to the principal’s office, while for black kids, “they call in the cops.” DeVos refused to say such a discrepancy is wrong . . . . Black public school students are suspended at 3.8 times the rate of white students. That discrepancy alone doesn’t necessarily demonstrate discrimination, but there’s evidence that students of color are punished differently from white students for the same infractions.

Combine this tacit license to discriminate with the Trump administration plan to encourage the arming of teachers, and you have a recipe for something combustible. There’s a lesson here that applies across the administration. Don’t let the clownishness distract you from the bigotry.

Betsy DeVos - An Enemy to Public Education and LGBT Americans

Many of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer's cabinet nominees are more than a bit frightening.  Attorney General pick Jeff Session's has a racists history and was viewed as to extreme back when I lived in Alabama.  That, of course was before the Christofascists took over the Alabama Republican Party and merged a longing for segregation with a desire to impose a Christian version of Sharia law on that state.  Vladimir Putin loving Rex Tillerson is another frightening Trump pick. But in some ways perhaps the most disturbing is Betsy DeVos, a long time opponent of both the LGBT community - she has lavishly funded a who's who of anti-LGBT hate groups - and public education itself.  On the later issue, for years she has sought ways to shift public school funds from public schools to private school, many of which are right wing religious affiliated school.  Such schools provide a backdoor approach to re-segregating schools and a vehicle to provide extremist religious indoctrination to students. A length piece in the New York Times looks at this woman whose view of the poor makes Marie Antoinette's mythical statement "let them eat cake" look kind and soft hearted. Here are article highlights:

In announcing his intention to nominate Ms. DeVos, Mr. Trump described her as “a brilliant and passionate education advocate.” Even critics characterized her as a dedicated, if misguided, activist for school reform. But that description understates both the breadth of Ms. DeVos’s political interests and the influence she wields as part of her powerful family. More than anyone else who has joined the incoming Trump administration, she represents the combination of wealth, free-market ideology and political hardball associated with a better-known family of billionaires: Charles and David Koch.

Like the Kochs, the DeVoses are generous supporters of think tanks that evangelize for unrestrained capitalism, like Michigan’s Acton Institute, and that rail against unions and back privatizing public services. . . .

DeVoses’ education activism, which favors alternatives to traditional public schools, appears to derive from the same free-market views that inform their suspicion of government. And perhaps more than other right-wing billionaires, the DeVoses couple their seeding of ideological causes with an aggressive brand of political spending. Half a dozen or more extended family members frequently coordinate contributions to maximize their impact.

In the 2016 cycle alone, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, the family spent roughly $14 million on political contributions to state and national candidates, parties, PACs and super PACs.

All of this would make Ms. DeVos — whose confirmation hearing has been delayed until next week amid mounting pressure that her government ethics review be completed beforehand — very different from past education secretaries.

“She is the most emblematic kind of oligarchic figure you can put in a cabinet position,” said Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites. “What she and the Kochs have in common is the unbridled use of wealth power to achieve whatever political goals they have.”

Ms. DeVos, 59, grew up in Holland, Mich., the daughter of a conservative auto parts magnate who was an early funder of the Family Research Council [a certified anti-LGBT hate group], a conservative Christian group. When she married Dick DeVos in 1979, it was akin to a merger between two royal houses of western Michigan.

Her husband’s father, Richard Sr., co-founder of the multilevel marketing company Amway, was an active member of the Christian Reformed Church that preached a mix of social conservatism and self-reliance. He once told the church’s official magazine that Chicago’s poor dwelled in slums because that was “the way they choose to live,” according to a Washington Post story from the 1980s.

The flip side of the family’s proselytizing for capitalism, according to Professor Phillips-Fein, has been an effort to dismantle much “that would counterbalance the power of economic elites.”

While Dick and Betsy DeVos appear to practice a more tolerant form of Christianity than their parents — Ms. DeVos has spoken out against anti-gay bigotry — as recently as the early 2000s they funded some groups like Focus on the Family, a large ministry that helps set the political agenda for conservative evangelicals. They have also backed groups that promote conservative values to students and Christian education . . .

The family spent millions of dollars on a ballot proposal in 2000 asking if Michigan should legalize vouchers, in which students can use taxpayer money to attend private schools.

Many critics, like the education historian Diane Ravitch, argue that the point of vouchers is to destroy public education and teachers’ unions. The group Americans United for Separation of Church and State has documented how conservative Christians have long supported vouchers, which could fund religious schools.

[C]ritics see someone with an unmistakable agenda. “The signs are there that she will do something radical,” said Jack Jennings, a former general counsel for the House education committee. “Trump wouldn’t have appointed this woman for this position if he didn’t intend something radical.”

GOP/Conservative Groups Plan US-wide Assault on Education, Health and Public Sector

David Koch

The hypocrisy of Republicans and self-professed Bible worshiping conservatives continues to soar to new levels.  As The Guardian reports, plans are underway for a 34 state campaign to "release residents from government dependency," which of course, really means that the poor and those without health care will be cast into the gutter to hopefully die while education spending is gutted.  Helping to fund this effort to bring back the worse aspects of the Gilded Age are not surprisingly the greed driven billionaire Koch brothers.   Shockingly, another major supporter is food giant Kraft and multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline (yes, the boyfriend and I will be changing our shopping patterns).  The article also highlights the pressing need to halt the political activities of alleged charities that are nothing more than funding funnels Here are story highlights:for the far right. 

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. . . . The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014.

In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.

The article is lengthy, so read the entire piece.

Ken Cuccinelli Seeks to Amend Virginia Constitution To Allow Taxpayer Funding of Religious Schools

I have said for a long time that GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is a religious extremists who if given his way would destroy the separation of church and state handed down from the Founding Fathers.  Now, Cuccinelli is proposing that the Virginia Constitution be amended to allow taxpayer funding of religious schools thereby diverting funding from the Commonwealth's public schools.  This type of proposal was anathema to the Founding Fathers who wanted to established religion and no mandatory public support of of sectarian institutions.  In contrast, what Cuccinelli is proposes gives the theocrats at The Family Foundation a veritable wet dream.  Here are highlights from Think Progress:

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R), his party’s nominee in this November’s gubernatorial election, unveiled a 12-point education plan Tuesday. Among his proposals: Virginia should amend its constitution to allow public funding for religious education.

Cuccinelli, who has blasted the Catholic Church for creating a “culture of dependency on government, not God,” proposed that Virginia should divert taxpayer funds from public education to parochial school vouchers. He claimed that the separation of church and state provisions in Article IV, Section 16 of Virginia’s constitution were merely anti-Catholic bigotry:

Virginia has provisions in its constitution that explicitly bar government aid to “sectarian” schools or institutions, including the so-called Blaine Amendment. The Blaine Amendment was passed as a result of anti-Catholic bigotry in American politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which made clear that the federal Constitution permits aid through school choice programs, Virginia’s Blaine Amendment restricts the ability to enact broad-based school choice programs. A state constitutional amendment is needed that is narrowly drafted to allow for school choice programs that do not restrict parents’ choices about what is best for each of their children.

  [P]ublic finding to any sectarian institutions . . . [is] explicitly prohibited by Virginia’s constitution.

While the nation and Virginia were founded on the belief that religions should be free from government interference in teaching their beliefs, it has also been the longstanding view that the government should not pay for religions to do so.

Cuccinelli seemingly ignores his [Thomas Jefferson's] 1779 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. In that law, passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, Jefferson wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical,” and that “even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness.”

Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is still part of the Code of Virginia even though the GOP controlled General Assembly has repeatedly ignored its principles and enacted blatantly religious based laws that marginalize gays and others who do not conform to Christofascist religious beliefs.  Here are more quotes from the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom which is one of three things Jefferson wanted to be remembered for (the other two are founding the University of Virginia and authoring the Declaration of Independence):

Almighty God hath created the mind free,and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from theplan of the Holy author of our religion, . .

the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time . . .

to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own . . . .

What Jefferson so eloquently condemned is precisely what Cuccinelli and the extremists at The Family Foundation seek to inflict on all Virginians.  Cuccinelli MUST be defeated in November.  Otherwise, the days of religious freedom for all in Virginia is numbered.  

More Young Women Educated in Religious Schools Have More Abortions

While at first blush this headline seems counter intuitive, but on reflection it makes since: abstinence only sex education doesn't work and leaves young women in schools that advocate only this approach are left ignorant of contraception methods. A new study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior confirms this fact. Overall, it is in keeping with the religious extremists' refusal to accept objective fact and studies that show that comprehensive sex education leads to reduced levels of abortion. And while many such schools are strenuously anti-abortion, they in fact help increase the number of abortions. Here are some story highlights:

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A new study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior shows that young women in their teens or early twenties who have attended religious schools are more likely than their peers to get an abortion, despite their beliefs. In fact, the research points out, these girls are more likely than those in the public school system to get pregnant without being too mature or married. The findings are very weird, because private religious schools, regardless of the god they promote, pride themselves in enforcing a very strict policy as far as contacts between their students go.

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For her research, the expert kept an eye on 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced young women in 125 different schools around the United States, aged 26 or younger. The goal of the investigation was to determine exactly how religious behavior influenced the young girls' decisions to have an abortion. Other studies have shown a strong link between religion and abortion attitudes, but this correlation has thus far remained largely unstudied.

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When analyzing the variables in the research, the expert learned that neither religious involvement, nor frequency of prayer or the perception of religion's importance has any bearing on the women's decision.
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“Religious school attendance is not necessarily indicative of conservative religious beliefs because students attend these schools for a variety of reasons. These schools tend to generate high levels of commitment and strong social ties among their students and families, so abortion rates could be higher due to the potential for increased feelings of shame related to an extramarital birth,” the expert concluded.