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.

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.