We don’t want your kind. getty Over the past few years, the Supreme Court has, step by step, broken large holes in the wall between church and state when it comes to education. Now a lawsuit in Maine proposes to shatter a few more bricks. 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. Like other cases in this sequence, the decision seemed to elevate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment over the establishment clause . In his dissent, Justice Breyer points some possible outcomes: What happens once “may” becomes “must”? Does that transformation mean that a […]
