Court Says, Again, That Schools Accepting State Funds Must Follow State Rules

From Forbes.com

For the second time in six months, a U. S. District judge has ruled in Maine that private schools that accept state funds can be required to follow state anti-discrimination rules. The case is another epilog to a Supreme Court decision declaring that the state cannot deny religious schools access to taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Carson v. Makin spun from a peculiarity of Maine education law. Because not all small towns in Maine can afford to run their own school system, the state allows for vouchers for students from one community without a school to attend in a community that has one. But the law restricted the use of those vouchers to schools that did not venture outside the traditional, secular model. Lower courts agreed that “Maine’s tuition program does not act as a penalty for religious exercise, it merely declines to subsidize it.”

In June of 2022, the Supreme Court disagreed, saying that if the state paid for a secular school option, it must also pay for the religious version. Like other cases in this sequence, the decision seemed to elevate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment over the establishment clause.

The win in Carson did not go quite far enough for some. Maine had modified its Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, shutting some private religious schools out of the voucher system to which Carson had won them admission.

Crosspoint Church, which operates Bangor Christian School (one of the Carson schools), filed its suit in March of 2023. In a ruling filed at the end of February, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock, a 2003 George W. Bush appointee with senior status since 2017, denied the request for a preliminary injunction, indicating that he did not believe the BCS lawsuit would succeed.

Now that same judge has handed down a decision in a suit brought in June 2023 by the Catholic Diocese of Portland, a Catholic family, and St. Dominic Academy, once again denying the request for an injunction.

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