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Should taxpayers fund this?getty 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 […]