Maine won’t have to change their state motto, but it might need to clarify its nuance. It is “Dirigo,” Latin for I direct, or I lead, and they are leading and directing … religious groups to sue them for violating their First Amendment Rights.
Maine: I Lead the assault on the First Amendment! And, as it turns out, to get rebuffed.
Last June (2022), The US Supreme Court, in Carson v. Makin, decided that Maine’s tuitioning program for school-aged kids violated the Free Exercise Clause of the US Constitution.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that while “a state need not subsidize private education” that “once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”
“Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Roberts wrote. “Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”
Roberts said that the program “effectively penalizes the free exercise” of religion by doling out benefits based upon whether a school is religious.
Your government is not obligated to offer tuition assistance that could end up in the hands of a private institution, but if it does, it cannot discriminate based on creed. The Board members of the Hermon School Department in Maine must have missed the memo.
The school rents out space on short-term leases. The lease form “does not include any questions about the organization’s beliefs.” But when the School Committee got their hands on an application from The Pines Church, they began asking questions. “Superintendent Micah Grant and a member of the Hermon school board asked pointed questions about the church’s positions on “issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Chris McLaughlin, a school board member who includes personal pronouns in his signature, wrote that he “wanted to get a better sense of how The Pines Church approaches issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and around their messaging around some key issues relevant to marginalized communities.”
He asked, “Is The Pines Church receptive of same-sex marriages? Do they consider marriage only to be between 1 man and 1 woman?”
He also requested information on the church’s positions on “access to safe and affordable abortion,” “access to gender-affirming medical care,” “conversion therapy for LGBTQIA+ individuals (youth and adults),” and “inclusive sexual education and access to birth control for youth.”
Does the Hermon school conduct same-sex marriages, abortions, or genre-affirming medical procedures? Did they ask these questions of “Black Bear Basketball, Hermon Recreation, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and various baseball groups” who have or are leasing space at the school?
Superintendent Grant. Doesn’t your inquiry, in its intelligent design, establish a religious test (which is unlawful) to exclude a person or group from a public facility based on their religious beliefs? Nothing diverse or equitable about that, but it fits the mandate. DEI is a loyalty test or oath to a partisan political worldview. Taken on the same terms as any other belief system, its goal is the homogenization of the cultural faith of Humanism. A view to which you are entitled but one that cannot serve as a litmus if it runs afoul of the establishment clause.
I know that’s not exactly true. Secular Humanism undergirds much of the progressive worldview, but it is not recognized as a belief system in the same way as Judaism or Christianity. If it were, there would be a wall of separation problem for the Left. Abandon your proselytizing or admit that the Danbury Baptist letter was private correspondence and not legal precedent.
And even then, you should probably acknowledge your bastardization of the alleged precedent.
Jefferson was clear. The Federal Government had no business interfering with state or local rights about matters of faith, which would be good and bad for the progressives running the Hermon School Department. On the one hand, the Feds could not force the school to rent the space in deference to its humanist beliefs if supported by state law. On the other, the fourteenth amendment enjoins the Bill of Rights to prevent states from violating it at the state and local level, at least as far as the next Judge is willing to interpret them.
Regardless of how you spin it, there’s still a contradiction you can’t escape. What exactly is equitable or inclusive about exclusion on any terms?
HT | The Daily Signal
