Vermont has a squishy Republican governor and veto-proof majorities of Dems in its legislature. Team Blue is looking for a workaround to Carson v. Makin which forbids a state with a tuitioning program from discriminating against children who might want to spend it at faith-based schools.
They say things like, “More public education money than ever is going to religious schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students.”
Families are already taking their public money to religious schools here in Vermont.
And some of these schools, on their websites, and in their admission papers, say they won’t admit gay or trans students. So, you know, our public money is now paying for religious schools that discriminate against these kids.
And there’s another thing, and that’s that there’s a compelled support clause in the Vermont Constitution, and that says that Vermonters cannot be forced to support a religion they don’t agree with.
For the record, Vermonters have been forced to support religions with which they might disagree for decades. The Feds hand billions in “public money” to religious organizations to resettle refugees yearly. Billions with a “B.” Democrats (as a Party) not only have no qualms or concerns, they’ve been known to defend the investment.
They’d give money to Jesus himself if he were willing to hold a BLM sign or wear Antifa black block and suppress the speech of Republicans.
This is not a question of discrimination (unless you mean against people of faith). It is about education control. The Constitution continues to get between them and your children, and schools that won’t indoctrinate kids in the fashionable gender mythology of the day threaten their ‘mission.’
As for discriminating against gay or trans kids, as long as they can get whatever the government claims passes for an education, they can choose any private school they want. Sorry, that’s not true. Numerous private schools refuse kids for a wide range of reasons. These are the schools to which the wealthier among us, including those on the Political Left, send their kids.
They are expensive enough to make them exclusive bastions of ruling-class privilege—places where academic rigor results in a mind taught how to learn, not just what to learn.
The government schools are for everyone else and, with the help of government unions, are a monopoly over which the progressive project (with rare exceptions) have absolute educational and ideological control. A cartel that funnels “public money” through a system that, with few exceptions, advocates and activates a partisan political agenda that -coincidentally – aligns with the priorities of Vermont Democrats.
They have a trapped (future) constituency through whom they can advance policy. But people of faith are protected from government mandates that force them to operate outside their chosen belief system. Children and their parents or guardians cannot be prohibited from using a state school tuitioning program.
And since the state cannot be so bold as to refuse to certify qualifying faith-based schools to protect their secular monopoly, they are left with how to prevent students who might do better outside the public school from using education dollars to get that education beyond their control.
That is the problem Vermont Democrats are trying to solve, and so far, they’ve been unable to find a way to do it, and that’s good news.
