OK: Catholic Church Proposes Religious Charter

Last December, Oklahoma Attorney General John O'Connor issued an opinion stating that in light of recent Supreme Court decisions, he believes that the SCOTUS would "very likely" find unconstitutional the state requirement that charter schools be non-sectarian. The Catholic Church is wasting no time testing that theory.

The church has proposed a virtual charter--St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, named for a sixth-century catholic bishop and scholar, who is patron saint of the internet (a "saint who can help us find what we need as well as protect us from the darker side of the World Wide Web"). The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City collaborated with the Diocese of Tulsa made their pitch on Valentines Day, with the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board expected to make a decision April-ish. 

Brett Farley is the executive director of Catholic Conference of Oklahoma says, Oh, hey, it'll just be a regular charter school, nothing to see here:

We’re not talking about establishing a religion through religious charter schools. All we’re talking about is an anchor carrying values and principles and virtues, so forth, as we’re already doing in our schools.

It seems unlikely that anyone in the state is buying that. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has already popped up to point out that Oklahoma's charter law says you can't do that religious charter thing. 

And Michael Scaperlanda, the Chancellor of Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, says, "I think Attorney General O’Connor's opinion was a very good opinion of the current state of constitutional law and why St. Isidore and other charter schools are not public actors and not state actors." In other words, when the dust clears, we are totally going to have a religious charter school.

While SCOTUS has already cleared enough ground for this to happen, they could conceivably blast the church-state wall further if they rule on Peltier vs. Charter Day School, a case nominally about a sexist antediluvian dress code but which hinges on whether charter schools are really public schools or actually private non-state-actors (and therefor free from government regulations).  

Inside religious circles, folks are pretty damned excited. In a piece in First Things (which claims to be America's most influential journal of religion and public life), the authors make their real case:

The premises of St. Isidore’s application are clear and straightforward. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the “free exercise” of religion and so prohibits anti-religious discrimination by governments. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in last summer’s Carson v. Makin decision, “a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” Accordingly, the justices ruled, it was unconstitutional for Maine to exclude “sectarian” schools from a program that helped pay the private school tuition of kids who live in rural areas without government-run schools. By the same token, the Oklahoma attorney general’s letter correctly reasons, a state may not open up a charter school program—one that permits private entities to accredit and operate a wide variety of schools—but exclude otherwise qualified schools simply because of their religious character or affiliation.

And lest we forget, the folks busy tearing down the wall between church and state would like to keep a door there that only swings one way.

Note that St. Isidore’s argument is not that secular, civil governments in the United States may or should operate religious enterprises. After all, the First Amendment also protects religious freedom by outlawing religious establishments. Under our Constitution, religious and political institutions and authorities are distinct. They may and often do cooperate, to be sure: Governments have long funded religious agencies’ healthcare and social welfare services, asylum resettlement and anti-human trafficking efforts, and schooling and research. What our “separation” of church and state means, though, is that secular governments do not decide matters of religious doctrine or interfere with churches’ religious affairs.

In other words, the First Amendment is there to keep government from messing with then church, but the church should be free to mess with government all it wants, including hoovering up those public tax dollars while performing government functions (like school), but not with any government rules and regulations being applied. 

In other words, they like the part of the wall that serves them, but only that part.

The formal, clear erasure of any sort of rules, any manner of regulation or oversight, means that we are inching (well, actually, footing or yarding) towards removing any sort of meaningful distinction between charter school programs and vouchers. Either way, the already extraordinarily wealthy Catholic Church will be able to collect government subsidies for its private religious education system, drawing taxpayer dollars even from taxpayers whose presence within its school walls will be forbidden.