There are just so many advocates for religious freedom who have no actual interest in religious freedom at all. And a whole lot of them hold office in Florida.
We've seen this before. Back in 2024, Florida's legislators thought they had a clever idea for getting Christianity injected into the classroom with the passage of a law allowing volunteer chaplains (or chaplain wannabes) in schools. The law was very explicit in placing no requirements for "chaplains" to belong to a particular faith, but as soon as the Satanic Temple announced an interest in signing up some volunteers for chaplaining,
Governor Ron DeSantis announced that the state was "not playing those games" which appeared to mean the game of declaring yourself a religion without his personal seal of approval of your faith.
Religious freedom, he appears to believe, is only for the religions that he approves of.
Now, here we go again. State officials are upset that their voucher program designed to funnel public taxpayer dollars to private religious schools has started funneling money to the wrong religion!
Attorney General James Uthmeier, Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, all GOP DeSantis buddies,
want to know why the hell the state is funding Islamic schools in the state.
“Sharia law seeks to destroy and supplant the pillars of our republican form of government and is incompatible with the Western tradition,”
said Uthmeier on the Twitter. “The use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers to promote Sharia law likely contravenes Florida law and undermines our national security.”
“Schools that indoctrinate Sharia law should not be a part of our taxpayer-funded school voucher program,” posted Agriculture Commissioner Wilson Simpson, a big time voucher supporter.
Some of the outrage fuel appears to be coming from RAIR Foundation USA. RAIR Foundation is "a grassroots activist and investigative journalism organization made up of everyday Americans leading a movement to reclaim our Republic from the network of individuals and organizations waging war on our nation — on our Constitution, our borders, and our Judeo-Christian values." RAIR was founded by
social media influencer Amy Mekelberg (known for years as Amy Mek until
HufPost unmasked her). RAIR now supposedly stands for Rise Align Ignite Reclaim but originally stood for Resistance Against Islamic Radicals. RAIR is on the Southern Poverty Law Center list of hate groups.
School Choice began as a movement to rescue children from failing public schools, but it has also become a taxpayer-funded pipeline for Islamic indoctrination.
So the message from some on the right continues to be that religious freedom is great, but only when it applies to the correct religion. It is okay to spend taxpayer dollars on private religious schools, but only as long as those schools practice the correct religion. And the state will decide whose religion is correct and whose is not.
This is exactly what the First Amendment is for, and exactly why there should not be programs designed to redirect taxpayer dollars to private religious schools-- because the inevitable result is for the state to inject itself into a discussion about whose religion is acceptable and deserves to be supported by the taxpayers. And those taxpayers might themselves have a few words to say about having their tax dollars go to support a religion they disagree with. School voucher systems are set up so that christianists must pay to support Islamic schools, anti-semites must pay to support Hebrew schools, Southern Baptists must pay to support Catholic schools, and non-religious folks must pay to support all manner of religious schools. The solution is there in the Constitution and in most state constitutions as well-- keep the government out of the private religious school business entirely.
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