GA: Suing For More Religious Entitlement

In Georgia, a lawsuit has been filed that will require the state to admit its voucher program was founded on a fiction and to provide another entitlement to religious schools.

Georgia had some trouble passing a voucher law because rural GOP members correctly concluded that a taxpayer-funded voucher program would drain resources from the schools serving their constituents. Georgia privatizers finally got their bill in 2024, and from the very beginning, it was clearly not the law that was sold.

One piece was a bit of linguistic sleight of hand. While folks had talked about the bill's aim to rescue students from failing schools, the bill actually said that taxpayer-funded vouchers are available to any students who live in the attendance area of a failing school. In other words, if you were a high school student in the attendance area for a failing elementary school, you were entitled to a voucher. When this was revealed, some outlets wrote about this as if someone had "changed" something. Nope. The law said what it had always said; supporters just let the conversation continue as if the bill said something different. See folks? Reading is important. In this case, not reading led to a program the cost of which blew up far beyond predictions.

The new lawsuit goes after another piece of the law. The law says vouchers are only available for students who have previously attended public schools in a failing attendance area. But three Catholic families say that this requirement violates their religious freedom and is "coercive." They should be entitled to have their religious education paid for without any such attendance requirements.

In other words, the taxpayer funded voucher program is not supposed to rescue students from failing schools. It's supposed to require public taxpayer funds to support private religious schools.

As quoted by Sydney Stallworth at WRDW, Jamie Mann, founder of New Horizons New Directions Prep Academy said “I believe parents should decide how their child is educated." Mann left off the part that adds "And all the taxpayers should pay for it, no matter what."

Lead attorney is Nathan Loyd, of the Thomas More Society, one more right-wing Roman Catholic activist law firm funded by Donors Trust, the dark money billionaire laundering operation. They are also running a New Jersey lawsuit for Moms for Liberty against a school district accused of allowing school staff to conceal a student gender transition from parents (because parents have rights and students have none). They have been involved in litigation against the ACA's contraception requirement, helped defend clerks who opposed same-sex marriage, and even went after no-fault divorce law.  As a bonus, also active in supporting the January 6 insurrection. (Thomas More was himself a Catholic martyr and the guy who wrote Utopia) I cannot fault them for going plaintiff shopping to find some good Catholics to bring this lawsuit, because a huge number of important lawsuits are brought because some lawyers went plaintiff shopping for a face to slap on their cause. Not a great way to run a legal system, but that's a complaint for another day.

Extending taxpayer-funded vouchers is a way to make the program even more expensive. When you give taxpayer-funded vouchers to students who were never in public school, you are adding entirely new costs onto your state education expenditure. The money is not following the child because no money had ever followed that child into the public school in the first place.

But if your intent is simply to create a system where religious schools (well, you know, the ones that follow the correct religion) are entitled to taxpayer subsidies, then this lawsuit makes perfect sense. 

Certainly now is the time. The Supremes have made it clear that they are very open to the legal theory that religious folks can only fully exercise religious freedom if A) they get a taxpayer subsidy and B) they get to discriminate against whoever they wish to discriminate against. So I'll pay attention to this lawsuit, but I don't have any illusions about how it will shake out.