FL: State Wants To Run Church Business

The Catholic Church and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier are in the midst of an argument about who runs Catholic private schools.

Catholic private schools, says Uthmeier, should allow students to enroll without vaccination if they plead religious exemption. Uthmeier expressed his thoughts publicly, coupled with a demand that the Catholic church explain itself within seven days. And have waved threateningly in the direction of Catholic School eligibility for Florida's taxpayer-funded school vouchers. "Nice funding stream we gave you there. Be a shame if something happened to it." 

Michael Sheedy, the executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, responded on August 7. Here's the opening of that letter. See if you think Sheedy is intimidated:

As explained in detail below, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops (FCCB) and the Catholic bishops in Florida do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching and their reasons for the current vaccine policies. They will, however, do so out of respect for you and your office and with the understanding and expectation that your office will respect the Catholic bishops’ constitutional rights and religious freedom. 

While we appreciate the opportunity to present the rationale for school vaccine policies, we wish we could have met and discussed these concerns with your office and perhaps avoided all the public and legal posturing created by your correspondence requesting a response in seven days.   

There's irony all around here. Nobody has pushed harder for policies that funnel public dollars to private schools than has the Catholic Church. But they much prefer the model in which the state hands over the money and then leaves the private school alone. Many states have carefully written voucher laws to require the state to stay hands off, but Florida's HB 1, the 2023 voucher bill, somehow skipped that part. 

So now the Catholic Church finds itself in a completely predictable position; when you break down the wall between church and state, the church may get public money, but they also lose protection from the interference of zealous public officials who are more than happy to tell church folks how they should properly go about the free exercise of their religion (see also: every state that passed a law requiring schools to post the official state version of the Ten Commandments).

Folks on the right have also predicted this and railed against it. Government money means government interference along with a reduced ability to resist. Or, as I always say, when you mix religion and politics, you get politics. 

Or as Sheedy put it, "Government officials may no more determine the content of Catholic teaching than Church officials may determine the content of Florida law." Which is, again, ironic, because the church officials actually worked really hard to determine the content of Florida law when it comes to taxpayer education money. Three years ago, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops thought this law was awesome.

On the other hand, if Uthmeier rubbed three of his MAGAbro brain cells together for two seconds, he would realize this is not a fight he wants to win. There isn't anything anywhere in HB 1 on which to hang his demands, so he's left with "Private religious schools that accept vouchers must do what the state tells them to or else," and I'm thinking there a lot of folks on the conservative and pro-voucher side who aren't ready to support that. 

But Uthmeier is a certified real piece of work. He's been a US Department of Commerce senior counsel and senior advisor in the Trump administration, general counsel for Ron DeSantis, and the DeSantis chief of staff until appointed AG. He whipped up a new "Free State of Florida" seal, proposed Alligator Alcatraz, called surrogacy "modern day slavery," and went after a teenage transgender girl in a national women's Irish dance step competition. He chaired the committee that illegally used the Hope Foundation money for political purposes. And he drew a contempt citation from a US District Judge for ignoring her ruling to shut down an illegal Florida immigration law. Uthmeier stated "If being held in contempt is what it costs to... stand firmly behind President Trump's agenda on illegal immigration, so be it." 

Also, part of his argument against vaccines is that they were developed using fetal cell lines. Which is not true.

And yes, as you may already have guessed, this MAGAbro who wants to tell the Catholic bishops what they believe and how to act on it is, himself, a Catholic.

So, yeah. He's that guy. So it's not hard to imagine that his principle here is "I'm allowed to tell the church what to do, but people I disagree with are not." In the Free State of Florida, that may be enough to get by.

"Any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights," writes Sheedy. He did not conclude "Now give us our free taxpayer money and shut up." 

This is just another version of the same fight that keeps breaking out right at the very spot where choicers busted a hole in the wall between church and state. There's nobody to root for here. We'll see if Uthmeier backs down or if the whole thing ends up in court. Grab your popcorn and stay tuned.