FTA:
In the long run, advocates of private school vouchers and charter schools may come to regret the Carson decision. By forcing states to choose between either having a single, unitary public school system, or having government-funded private and charter schools that teach religious views many citizens may find objectionable, Carson places secularly minded states in a difficult position. If those states don’t want to fund schools like St. Isidore, or other religious schools that may teach that LGBTQ people are immoral, Carson suggests that they must eliminate any programs funding private schools or publicly funded charter schools altogether.
Nevertheless, the Court’s Republican-appointed majority appears as unconcerned with this problem as it is with the problem of taxing secular citizens to pay for religious education.
The future of religion in the United States, in other words, is unlikely to involve police officers breaking into people’s homes to arrest them for skipping church. But it is likely to include far more government funding of religious activity, far more proselytizing by teachers, coaches, and other government officials who wield authority over children, and many more monuments to Christianity — all paid for by your taxes.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As the Supreme Court said in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”
Everson read this prohibition on coerced religious activity expansively to include not just direct use of force against nonbelievers, but also the use of taxes collected from the general public to fund religion.
“One of the greatest dangers to the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way,” Black warned, “lay in the Government’s placing its official stamp of approval upon one particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious services.”
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in an influential 1984 concurring opinion, government endorsements of religion undercut the pluralistic idea that all citizens enjoy equal political standing.
Similarly, in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Court held that the establishment clause’s prohibition on coercion extends not just straightforward attempts to force a nonbeliever to participate in religion — such as if the government were to arrest or fine anyone who does not attend a church service.
Among other things, Gorsuch cites favorably to Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lee, which described Justice Kennedy’s concerns about subtle pressure on public school students as “precious,” and which declares outright that “the coercion that was a hallmark of historical establishments of religion was coercion of religious orthodoxy and of financial support by force of law and threat of penalty.” Gorsuch also quotes James Madison, claiming that Madison understood the First Amendment “to prevent one or multiple sects from ‘establish[ing] a religion to which they would compel others to conform.’”
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