In Maine, Lawsuit Argues That State Must Fund Discrimination In Religious Schools
At Forbes.com, I take a look at the sequel to the case that determined that the state of Maine must issue vouchers for private religious schools. For some religious schools in Maine, that’s not quite enough.
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 non-religious schools. 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.
The brief for Carson v. Makin provides a closer look at the two private schools involved which helps illustrate the stakes. Bangor Christian Schools require adherence to a code of conduct; trans or gay students will be expelled, even if celibate. Their religious indoctrination is inseparable from their academic instruction. A fifth grade social studies objective is to “recognize God as Creator of the world,” while a ninth grade objective is to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s word.” Teachers at BCS must certify that they are born again Christians.
The schools named in the suit have said that they will not accept taxpayer funding if accepting those dollars would require them to stop discriminating. And in fact, Maine got ahead of the Supreme Court by passing an amendment to the state’s anti-discrimination law expressly forbidding certain types of discrimination by any school that accepts public funds.
And that brings us to the new lawsuit.
Bangor Christian Schools is now suing the state of Maine, asking first for an injunction against the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA) restriction that bars them from receiving state money as long as they continue to discriminate. Their assertion is that the “poison pill” of human rights law in Maine violates their religious liberty, that they cannot exercise that liberty unless they can both receive state funds and continue to discriminate against students and prospective faculty that don’t meet their religious requirements.