The Christian Nation Problem

If it seems like there are fundamentally different theories of government operating in this country, that's because there are.

Start with people who believe that the US is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles. I'm not going to argue that particular point at the moment, other than to note that the Founding Fathers disagreed about virtually everything. And I don't just mean the obvious slavery stuff. Patrick "Give me liberty or give me death" Henry was opposed to the Constitution. Thomas "These are the times that try men's souls" Paine thought George Washington was a bungling tool unfit for any important office. 

The notion that there was ever anything at all like a meeting that ended with the Founding Fathers looking around the room and saying, "Okay, so we're all agreed that we want to codify basic Biblical principles into the laws and functions of our government, right?" is silly. They agreed about nothing.

But the "founded as a Christian nation" idea is a tell, coming frequently hand in hand with a very different idea about the foundations of the country.

Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." That assertion that government's get their power from the consent of the governed is both ideological and practical. It's not just that instituting a government that way is the proper thing to do, but that to try to derive government power from other sources (like, say, the divine right of kings) leads sooner or later to uproar, revolt, destruction, decay. 

But for Christian Nationalists, the principle is that government derives its powers and legitimacy by alignment with God and God's dictates. 

To some people of faith, particularly those with an Old Testament bent, this makes sense. A nation prospers because it aligns itself with God; to break with God is to bring ruin on the country. 

But it also means that these people are starting with a different conception of what the country is about.

For one thing, the idea of a christian nation leads immediately to the idea of christian citizens. If the government is only legitimate to the degree it follows God's will, then citizens are only true citizens to the extent that they follow God's will.

All of this pushes the christian nation crowd to oppose democracy and democratic ideals. For them, democracy opens the door to letting citizens who are not legitimate citizens have a say. This is often what some of these believers are pointing at when they say that this country is a republic and not a democracy--a republic is built much more around the idea of government being steered by only those legitimate citizens, who are protected from the influence of the illegitimate others. 

None of this is to say that all christian nationalists want to lock up the illegitimate citizens, put them in camps, keep them in chains, etc. Many believe deeply in freedom, but by freedom they mean the opportunity for those people who are not properly aligned with God to get right with divine direction and come over the right side, at which time they can be rewarded with the rights and privileges of true citizens. They may even praise diversity, because they believe it's an awesome thing that folks from all these different backgrounds and origins can come together under the proper banner of God.

But until they come over to the banner, they should not be allowed to drag the country off course.

At first glance, some christian nationalist ideas may seem hypocritical, but they aren't, because the underlying principle is that people who are right with God have certain rights and privileges, and people who are Not Right need to be restrained and kept away from the levers of power, because if they get their hands on the levers of power, those Not Right people will steer the nation further away from alignment with God's Laws, thereby endangering the nation's future. 

And christian nationalists are constantly fighting the battle to keep the Not Right people from power. Welfare to undeserving, racial protests, immigration, voting rights--none of these are about addressing real problems, but are part of a web of excuses and sneaky strategies to give Not Right people more power in our country. You can't really chip away at their belief that 2020 elections (and others) are rigged, because the issue is not so much specific instances of fraud as the gnawing belief that there are all these Not True American people who are getting to vote who shouldn't get to vote. 

Through this lens, we see a different purpose of education--to bring up true citizens who understand the true things that bring them in alignment with God's true word. There is no reason to confuse students with ideas that we already know are wrong. Early in my career, my friend the gifted teacher taught a unit on world religions, looking at the ideas and history of each one. Said one of his Christian students, "I'm not doing this. There's no reason to study those other religions, because they are all wrong."

This debate about education has been going on for decades. It does not matter which label is being currently used--evolution, tolerance, LGBTQ, BLM in school, the 1619 project, sex ed, SEL--these are just the current label for a large complex of attempts to teach things in school that seduce students away from God's true word and alignment with it. That's why we find counters such as the Florida civics education program teaching that the founders didn't want a wall between church and state, among other things. 

School becomes an arena for debating the areas where christian nationalists and other Americans thrash out different values. Sometimes the language hides the disagreement. Everyone wants students to become good citizens who use critical thinking. But for some, "good citizen" means "aligned with God's truth" and "critical thinking" means "able to see through evil deception of those who try to lure you away from God's true word." 

Not all Christians, not all nationalists, not all conservatives. But more than enough to wreak havoc (particularly if they get themselves a judge's robe). 

But it's important, as we hash this out some more in the years ahead, to remember a couple of things.

1) This conflict is baked into our national DNA. So many colonists came here to get away from ugly messes where the church and state had become intertwined, and yet many, like the Puritans, did not think the problem was that the church was in charge of the state, but rather that the wrong church was in charge of the state. They escaped oppression so that they could be the oppressors.

2) We are dealing with people who don't share the value of democratic processes and democratic systems. In other words, hollering, "But that's not democracy works" at them will be fruitless.

What religious nationalists always fail to notice is that it always ends badly. It is not unreasonable to declare that God is not defined by a majority vote, however, humans have a long and bloody history of disagreeing about the nature and requirements of God. Turns out everybody has their own ideas about what, exactly, God's will might be.

They may dream of a country where only people who Believe Correctly are in charge, but such a country requires you to force people who disagree to shut up or force people who disagree to at least pretend to agree or force people who aren't part of the ruling church to accept what religion-backed-government chooses to take away from them, and those tricks not only don't work but also lead to huge civil messes. I believe the Founding Fathers were acutely aware of that history (after all--Great Britain had been through at least two ugly religion-related government upheavals in the 17th century) and that knowledge gave them ample reason to conclude that A) keeping the church away from government was a good idea and B) a government's power comes from the consent of the governed because when people stop consenting, governments find themselves with steadily decreasing power. 

We do not agree on what this country is meant to be. We never have, and a whole shelf full of historians have made hay parsing the various subdivisions. What our founders cobbled together was a system that made it hard for any one subdivision to take control from all the others. Doesn't mean they won't try. Doesn't mean they won't come frighteningly close.

But folks in the education space need to understand that the most severe of the christian nationalists have no interest in compromise. They have spoken for years about their need to take back the schools, and that is what they intend to do, with all the discrimination, segregation, privatization, taxpayer funding, and absence of government oversight that it entails. They have lost, as historian Adam Laats often points out, the "wars" over what the culture will be. That doesn't mean they can't still fight a battle over who will run the country where the culture exists and the schools where the culture is imparted. 

I know by the rules of this sort of essay I should wrap up with an encouraging plan of action, but I'm not really sure. I suspect it would help if everyone could stop viewing their opposition as slavering monsters, but if you view yourself as a soldier of God, it's hard not to see those who oppose you as agents of Satan. But I remain convinced that personal contact and connection can defuse much of this. How we transfer that energy over to politicians and media companies that are opportunistically profiting from the conflict I do not know. Surely there is some shared text that can help us, but right now we are all reading from completely different books, and I'm not sure how we bridge that. Sorry.

*Hat tip to Adam Laats and Katherine Stewart who articulate many of these ideas at greater length and in better ways that I do here. 

MAGA Group Calls For End Of Federal Establishment Clause

Seriously.

First we'll cover what they said, then look at who they are. 

In response to the SCOTUS decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which we learned that maybe prayer led by a school employee during working hours and involving students is actually okee dokee, America First Legal issued a statement. 

They thought the decision was great. But while other folks were content to argue that Coach Kennedy didn't violate the Establishment Clause, AFL went one better "asking the court to reconsider and overrule the Establishment Clause cases" that have caused so much grief and job loss to folks like Kennedy. In fact, even that is not enough. I'm quoting directly here so that you don't think I'm just making crazy stuff up:

AFL is hopeful that the justices will build on this ruling and eventually disincorporate the Establishment Clause, which fully protects the rights of states to decide whether and to what extent they will establish religion within their borders.

Yes, they said what they said. Throw it out so that every state can establish its own state religion.

Now, before you dismiss these guys as fringey cranks, let me tell you who they are.

AFL was established in February of 2021 by former senior White House advisor Stephen Miller and counselor to the Attorney General Gene Hamilton. They were set up to fight Democrat policies in the courts. Their board includes Mark Meadows, former acting AG General Matt Whitaker, and former director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought. They were announced with great joy and fanfare on the right (the American Spectator called them "a light in the darkness"). Trump himself gave them an endorsement. The Conservative Partnership Institute (a Jim Demint joint that's part of the State Policy Network) also takes credit for helping create AFL.

Their stated mission is, in part,

We founded America First Legal to save our country from this coordinated campaign. With your support, we will oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.

They want to preserve "the system our Founding Fathers established." If you're wondering how "disincorporating" part of the actual Constitution fits with that, as near as I can tell, they're going with the idea that the federal government isn't supposed to establish a religion, but the states should be totally free to. No word on whether they'll argue that states get to decide "free exercise" as well.

So if you're wondering what might be coming down the SCOTUS disassembly line next, keep your eye peeled for this one. Yikes.

PA: Joining The Gag Law Train

Some Pennsylvania GOP folks have decided they want to take a ride on the teacher gag law train and toss up some "parental rights" bills. Each follows the usual template, but offers some special variations.

First up-- Senate Bill 1278.

This is one of those bills requiring the school to tell parents if there is a "change in the student's services or monitoring related to the student's mental, emotional or physical health or well-being" as well as a requirement that the school must "reinforce the fundamental right of the parent or legal guardian to make decisions regarding the parent or legal guardian's child and encourage a student to discuss issues relating to the student's well-being with the parent or legal guardian or to facilitate discussion of the issue with the parent or legal guardian." 

There could be many situations that could trigger such a rule, but mostly these bills are about keeping the school from trying to secretly turn your kid gay or trans. This bill does include a disclaimer saying that the school can withhold such information "if a reasonably prudent person would believe, based on the documented testimony of the student or a history of documented incidents, that disclosure would result in child abuse or the child being abandoned."

There is a now-almost-hilarious saying that school personnel should show the same neutrality toward "sexual orientation and gender identity" as they are required to show toward religious beliefs, and maybe this is just the bill's author taking a snarky dig (Just use that neutrality thing you make us use with religion! Ha! Showed you! Hoist with your own petard now, aren't you!), but since the Supreme Court seems bent on dismantling that religious neutrality, the PA Senate may want to come up with new language. 

Also, for the gazillionth time-- virtually every text that portrays traditional gender roles is taking a non-neutral stance on gender identity and sexual orientation, so this requirement is functionally impossible to follow. But maybe the bill's author really meant "it should be illegal to tell kids that it's okay to be gay or trans."

This bill also includes private right of action for any parent who thinks the non-confidentiality thing has been violated by some teacher trying to turn their kid gay or trans, which means that if the student has given evidence that they are reasonably afraid of abuse or abandonment at home, all of that gets dragged into court when the school has to defend itself from the lawsuit. Want to guess what the Venn Diagram for "parents whose children are afraid of them" and "parents who will sue the school over this stuff" looks like?

Our other bill is Senate Bill 1277

This is a naughty books bill, requiring schools to notify parents of any "sexually explicit content." Including all texts, instructional materials, and library books. The school district needs to come up with policy for all this, and must have public meetings to let everyone have a say on what the policies should look like. 

This bill applies to all schools--public, charter, vocational, cyber-charter. Parents can review any and all materials and require the school to provide their student nonexplicit materials. The bill defines "sexually explicit content" as anything that contains "written descriptions of sexual conduct," which is super-vague, "materials that contain "visual or visually implied depictions of sexual conduct or simulations of sexual conduct," which is even vaguer-- what exactly is a visually implied depiction of sexual conduct?  And no "visual depictions of nudity" at all for K-8. Tough luck, health teachers. Also, how nude are we talking? 

Laws like these get in their own way because they are so vague and arbitrary that they raise far more questions than solutions. 

The sponsors insist that they are being bombarded with parental concerns so they need to empower them, Florida-style. 

Watch for these and other bills in Pennsylvania. Fun times. 

SCOTUS Okays School Prayer Based On Alternate Reality

I am absolutely gobsmacked. I expected that SCOTUS would okay school prayer via Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. I did not expect that their decision would be based on a disconnecting themselves from reality. 

The result is here. I'll walk you through the highlights (sputtering as I go). Sorry. I don't have time to make this short.

This is the case of the football coach who wanted to pray at the 50 yard line after games, and when the district told him to stop, decided he'd get his fifteen minutes of holy fame out of it. Full summary here.

Justice Gorsuch wrote this one, and he's in an alternate reality in the very first paragraph.

Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks.

Nope. Joseph Kennedy decided not to put in for the job for another season.

Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. 

This line of reasoning will be followed throughout. If you're on the clock, but can get away with dividing your attention, that counts as personal time. Not for the last time, Gorsuch and the berobed conservative activists of the court will demonstrate no understanding of how school jobs work. As a teacher, if I'm on my computer or phone while I'm supposed to be supervising students, I'm asking for trouble. And if I'm a coach or activity advisor, and my students have not officially left the building for home, then I had better be doing my job, which is keeping an eye on them.

What follows is a glowing version of Coach Kennedy's history with the school, putting emphasis on how quiet and personal and totally not while performing his duties as a government employee Kennedy's praying was. We will have to wait for the dissent to get the full story from this planet. What Gorsuch gets semi-right is that this practice stayed below the radar for a while, until Kennedy had expanded it enough that word got back to district officials, who had a church-and-state-separation freakout. 

But Kennedy had an epiphany driving home one night, and felt "compelled" to do the prayer, and send a big letter to the district, in which he offered to do the prayer quietly "while students were busy with other activities--whether heading to the locker room, boarding the bus, or perhaps singing the school fight song" which--no! The offer of "I'll just slip a prayer in when I'm supposed to be doing my job" is not a great offer!

On October 16, "some members of the community" joined him and "this event spurred media coverage." Well, yes-- as the dissent points out, Kennedy spurred, courted, welcomed and recruited media coverage, as well as (not for the first time) participation from the other team. The district continued to put pressure on, feeling that to not do so would suggest they were endorsing a school prayer, and that their understanding of the Constitution would be that such an endorsement was wrong. How very old school of them.

The district noted in their evaluation that Kennedy failed to supervise students after games and failed to follow district policy regarding religious expression. Kennedy decided not to put in for the job for the coming year.

Next comes the dissection of the previous cases, including boneheaded statements like this from Justice Alito:

JUSTICE ALITO expressed concerns with the lower courts’ decisions, including the possibility that, under their reasoning, teachers might be “ordered not to engage in any ‘demonstrative’ conduct of a religious nature” within view of students, even to the point of being forbidden from “folding their hands or bowing their heads in prayer” before lunch.

One of the things the justices will deliberately, repeatedly ignore in this case is the authority of a coach over his team. Kennedy reportedly never said, "You have to come pray with me." He wouldn't have to, any more than any coach ever has to say, "You must come to the optional practice." The "if you want to stay on my good side and get to play" is always silent. The lower court correctly found that 

because Mr. Kennedy “was hired precisely to occupy” an “influential role for student athletes,” any speech he uttered was offered in his capacity as a government employee and unprotected by the First Amendment.

Yes! How is that not the end of it? And the court the next level up was on point too

 According to the court, “Kennedy’s onfield religious activity,” coupled with what the court called “his pugilistic efforts to generate publicity in order to gain approval of those on-field religious activities,” were enough to lead an “objective observer” to conclude that the District “endorsed Kennedy’s religious activity by not stopping the practice.” 

How is that not the end? Well, SCOTUS has a way. Writes Gorsuch

Under this Court’s precedents, a plaintiff may carry the burden of proving a free exercise violation in various ways, including by showing that a government entity has burdened his sincere religious practice pursuant to a policy that is not “neutral” or “generally applicable.”

In other words--and stay with me here--a prohibition against religious speech is discriminatory if it's only applied to religious speech. I'm not sure--after all, I'm not a fancy lawyer--but I think Gorsuch is suggesting that the First Amendment's Establishment clause is invalid because it only applies to religious speech. At any rate, since the District's policies "were neither neutral nor generally applicable," they don't hold. Because the District admits that they didn't want to allow "an employee, while still on duty, to engage in religious conduct," they lose.

Gorsuch acknowledges that "none of this means the speech rights of public school employees are so boundless that they may deliver any message to anyone anytime they wish" because they are still government employees, which is a nice try, but I still will cross my fingers for a bunch of teacher lawsuits claiming  "My sincerely held religious belief require me to teach about systemic racism and regularly say gay."

I'm not going to try to capture the whole of Gorsuch's next point, but it boils down to something like this-- Kennedy's speech must have been private because it has nothing to do with doing his job, and therefor the District has no business firing him for engaging in speech that has nothing to do with his job."

Gorsuch goes on to acknowledge that those who say teachers and coaches are leaders and all that "have a point." 

But this argument commits the error of positing an “excessively broad job descriptio[n]” by treating everything teachers and coaches say in the workplace as government speech subject to government control.

If you listen, you can hear the sound of school administrator heads exploding all over America, as they realize they will now be responsible for figuring out exactly which words that teachers say count as workplace speech.

Next we move on to the district and its assertion that all this violated the establishment clause.

The District concluded that at a “reasonable observer” could think it “endorsed Kennedy’s religious activity by not stopping the practice." Which brings us to the Lemon test, a long-held (since 1971) means of assessing whether the establishment clause has been trampled or not and you could go study up on but--guess what!

SCOTUS just threw it out. This is a disturbing aspect of all this, because if Gorsuch's recital of the facts were true, then that would pretty much end things--but they still went out of their way to stamp on Lemon. So long, Lemon test. You were useful before, but the new guys don't like the answers you yield so, instead, they will substitute the--well, if you've been paying attention the last few weeks, you can see this one coming:

In place of Lemon and the endorsement test, this Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by “‘reference to historical practices and understandings.“‘[T]he line’” that courts and governments “must draw between the permissible and the impermissible” has to “‘accor[d] with history and faithfully reflec[t] the understanding of the Founding Fathers.’” 

Jesus, Mary, Mother of God. As with previous uses, this "test" can be used to roll everything back! Brown v. Board, here we come!

Does the school letting a coach lead prayer on the field look like endorsement of his activity? Who cares?  

This Court has long recognized as well that “secondary school students are mature enough . . . to understand that a school does not endorse,” let alone coerce them to participate in, “speech that it merely permits on a nondiscriminatory basis.”

Yes, if there's anything we know about students, it's how resistant they are to any kind of social pressure. But the court is going to stick to the argument that if nobody is actually demanding the students pray, there's no pressure. And, he adds, even if some people are offended by certain forms of speech or prayer they are sure to encounter in a society where those activities enjoy such robust constitutional protection, "offense does not equal coercion." And though the district reported students and parents who said they felt coerced, the court waves that away (Heck, they could have been talking about prayers led by some other previous coach).

The District and court circle back to the notion that they have an establishment clause duty to "suppress" religious talk, 

The only added twist here is the District’s suggestion not only that it may prohibit teachers from engaging in any demonstrative religious activity, but that it must do so in order to conform to the Constitution. 

Such a rule would be a sure sign that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence had gone off the rails. In the name of protecting religious liberty, the District would have us suppress it. Rather than respect the First Amendment’s double protection for religious expression, it would have us preference secular activity. Not only could schools fire teachers for praying quietly over their lunch, for wearing a yarmulke to school, or for offering a midday prayer during a break before practice. Under the District’s rule, a school would be required to do so.

Well, no. It would require them to ask the teacher to stop, maybe, but I doubt it. But Gorsuch has to resort to this because his argument hinges on the fiction that Kennedy was just a guy having a quick head bow in a quiet moment, and not a guy praying publicly and with much fuss in a way guaranteed to pressure students to join in.  

But note also the old religious right argument that secular and religious activities are somehow mutually exclusive, that secular stuff is somehow the opposite of religious stuff. I'm not going to wander off on this tangent now, but this fiction is at the heart of all of these church-state arguments--that secular stuff is somehow just another religion that is getting preferential treatment instead of another thing entirely.

Gorsuch's other argument piece is that there's no tension between establishment and free exercise clauses here, and that the coach is on the right side of both and nobody involved really understands the establishment clause correctly. Which is perhaps the biggest whopper here. But I guess one way to make the free exercise clause dominate is to turn the establishment clause into a whispy nothing.

 

Gorsuch wraps up:

Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic—whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. 

It's such a mischaracterization of the facts of the case one has to wonder, if Gorsuch is correct, how such a case could have been decided so incorrectly by lower courts. 

The answer, as laid out in detail in a dissent by Justice Sotomayor, is that Kennedy's "observance" was not brief, quiet, or personal. As Sotomayor writes

Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The Court now charts a different path, yet again paying almost exclusive attention to the Free Exercise Clause’s protection for individual religious exercise while giving short shrift to the Establishment Clause’s prohibition on state establishment of religion.

To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts.

Also, after noting that the majority just threw out Lemon, she writes

In addition, while the Court reaffirms that the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from coercing participation in religious exercise, it applies a nearly toothless version of the coercion analysis, failing to acknowledge the unique pressures faced by students when participating in school-sponsored activities. This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state. I respectfully dissent.

The dissent uses pages to lay out the many details of how Kennedy was not quiet or brief, including his invitations to opposing teams to join in, and that very special time where he went out and led a student prayer right in front of the administrator who has just asked him not to. Why the District didn't just fire him for insubordination I do not know.

And here, finally, is why the case is a big deal:

Properly understood, this case is not about the limits on an individual’s ability to engage in private prayer at work. This case is about whether a school district is required to allow one of its employees to incorporate a public, communicative display of the employee’s personal religious beliefs into a school event, where that display is recognizable as part of a longstanding practice of the employee ministering religion to students as the public watched. A school district is not required to permit such conduct; in fact, the Establishment Clause prohibits it from doing so.

This case will liberate all sorts of religious folks in public schools, and we'll get plenty more Jesus prayers across the country at school functions. More than that, this opens the door for religious private and charter schools to be openly religious; teamed up with last weeks Carson verdict that says taxpayer dollars can go straight to private religious schools, this makes taxpayer dollars for openly religious (and discriminatory) schools that much closer, as well as the full use of that religious schooling (and of course, by "religious," these folks mean "Christian") to supplant, replace, and feats on the dismantled pieces of public education.

Folks with more legal expertise can fill in the blanks here. I can read writing on walls and follow arguments to their logical conclusions. This is one ugly wall. Thomas and Alito add their own concurrences, in which they sort of assure us that this verdict says nothing larger about speech, and I'm sure we can trust them because they've never lied to us before.

There are also going to be all sorts of messy unintended consequences, including shenanigans from the Pastafarians and the Satanic Temple. There are going to be huge headaches for all the public school administrators who just became arbiters of what religious expression is okay, and which is not. And for students who are part of some minority non-christianish religion, daily life at school is going to become that much more miserable. Plus, there's a whole history of decisions based on Lemon that are now ;eft twisting in the wind.

I'll be waiting to hear what the anti-indoctrination crowd has to say about all this.

What a freaking mess of a decision. What a mess of a court. 

ME: That Private School Funding Goal Isn't Fully Realized Yet

So Maine's voucher program must now include private religious schools. The Supremes have thrown more weight behind the notion that the free exercise of religion requires taxpayer subsidies.

But in Maine, there's still a catch.

As many of us have been reporting, Maine actually got ahead of this particular case by amending their Human Rights law to specifically say that a private school can't get taxpayer dollars unless they abide by the laws against discrimination, including laws forbidding discrimination against LGBTQ persons.

That's a problem for the schools involved in Carson v. Makin, because discrimination is baked right into their program. 

Bangor Christian Schools require adherence to a code of conduct; trans or gay students will be expelled, even if celibate. Their religious indoctrination is inseparable from their academic instruction. A fifth grade social studies objective is to “recognize God as Creator of the world,” while a ninth grade objective is to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s word.” Teachers at BCS must certify that they are born again Christians.

Temple Academy is an extension of the Centerpoint Community Church. TA is unlikely to admit students that do not come from a Christian family; that family must sign a Family Covenant saying they agree with TA’s views on abortion, marriage, and homosexuality. Again, only born again Christians may be hired to teach; teachers also sign an employment agreement acknowledging that the Bible says that God considers “homosexuals and other deviants as perverted.”

Consequently, the schools have said all along that even if the case goes their way, they will not be accepting state money if it means altering their rules.

Not that they admit to discrimination. The spokesperson for the American Association of Christian Schools gave the AP this swell quote:

We don’t look at it as discrimination at all. We have a set of principles and beliefs that we believe are conducive to prosperity, to the good life, so to speak, and we partner with parents who share that vision.

This is not surprising rhetoric. There's a whole industry out there about helping Christian schools make sure they are only serving "mission-appropriate" families. It's not that they are discriminating against anyone; they're just refusing to serve people who aren't aligned with their values. And yes--because irony is not so much dead as drunk and in a ditch somewhere, this is a good parallel to the argument for not giving tax dollars to religious private schools, which the Supremes and their conservative lawyer friends characterize as "discrimination."

The private schools involved in the suit haven't had anything new to say, but if you think the hard-right law group that backed the case, the Institute for Justice (founded thirty years ago with Koch seed money), is about to shrug and say, "Well, the law is the law," senior attorney Michael Bindas has a statement for you:

“It was an erroneous opinion of the Maine attorney general that embroiled the state in five lawsuits spanning three decades and that culminated in the Supreme Court’s ruling against the state,” Bindas said Thursday in a statement. “The current attorney general seems to not have learned any lessons from that experience.”

The executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine also predicts that more lawsuits are in the future if Maine tries to enforce this law (which, I should also mention, is not in any way shape or form a Blaine amendment).

Getting taxpayer dollars aimed at religious (Christian) private school bank accounts was never going to be enough. The goal is for these schools to collect taxpayer dollars and also to freely discriminate as they see fit. The path is clear-- from Hobby Lobby to gay wedding cakes to Espinoza to Carson, the far right wants it understood that the only way to freely exercise your christianist faith is if you are subsidized by the taxpayer and able to treat people badly that you believe ought to be treated badly. What Kevin Welner calls the "outsourcing of discrimination."

SCOTUS has another shoe to drop on this path--in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, they heard the case of a coach who wants to lead student prayers at the 50 yard line after football games. It is absolutely clearly over the line--a public school employee while in the business of performing his duties as a public school employee leading a Jesus prayer with students over whom he exercises authority. But I would not bet even my dog's lunch that the court will not rule that his free exercise means he should get to lead whatever religious activities he so desires whenever he feels moved, thereby blasting one more hole in what's ;eft of the wall between church and state. 

ICYMI: SCOTUS Gets Their Chainsaw Edition (6/26)

Well, that was a week. The berobed conservative activists just took to chewing through all sorts of law in ways that seem to suggest that the chewing will not be over any time soon. There were no big surprises this week, but that doesn't lessen the impact.

So let's start with some reading about Carson and various thoughts about the possible fallout.

The Supreme Court Just Forced Maine to Fund Religious Education. It Won’t Stop There.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate puts it in the context of the "radical theory" that the establishment clause is not worth the paper its written on.

My free exercise can beat up your wall of separation

Blue Cereal Education takes a look at the relevant decisions that got us here. Plus a reading list.

How Supreme Court ruling lays groundwork for religious charter schools

Kevin Welner guests at The Answer Sheet (Washington Post) to break down how this gets us closer to a religious school free for all. Well, maybe not all.

No wonder Christian nationalists wanted these justices on the Supreme Court

Also at the Washington Post. If you want someone who's just pissed, here's Jennifer Rubin to call the reasoning "perverse"

The Hammer That Breaks The Church State Wall Has Hit Public Education Once Again. What Parts Of Our School System Will It Bring Down?

That wordy title courtesy of me, over at Forbes.com

All right. Let's move on to other issues, shall we?

When a Diverse book ban goes awry

In Wisconsin, a school board goes off the rails when it decides to toss out a book about Japanese internment. 

Federal judge to rule on attempt to block Florida law targeting 'woke’ lessons

Politico looks at an attempt to head off Ron DeSantis's anti "woke" rule.

PA court clarifies district's regulation of off-campus speech

Student initiates shenanigans from his home via social media. What are the rules for the school? A recent state supreme court decision offers a tiny bit of guidance.

Consulting firm will get $450,000 to help new Philly superintendent

Chalkbeat asks the question, "If you are hiring a high-cost new superintendent to run your district, should you also spend almost half a million bucks to hire someone to help him do his job?" They do not even get into the checkered Tennessee past of the consultant being hired.

An important school prayer case has an anniversary

A 30th anniversary look at a case that took Jesus prayers out of official school events, as a reminder that they're about to undo that one, too.

Dream Team being formed to hawk merit pay in North Carolina

North Carolina is trying hard to pitch a lousy merit pay system. Justin Parmenter has found some documents about the people who have been hired to PR the heck out of that bad idea.

An Elite Christian College Has Become The Latest Battleground In America’s Culture Wars

Johnathan Cohn writes about a huge LGBTQ flap at an elite Christian college. A good reminder that such colleges are more complicated than you may think. Bonus: the college is Calvin College, the alma mater of Betsy DeVos.

The concept of "Learning Loss" is BS

Teacher Tom is here to make this point again--do not panic over sales pitches tied to the Learning Loss boogieman

Provincialism, Ways of Being, and the Failure of Democracy

Paul Thomas doing what he does best--tying together a host of ideas and perspectives to show us something bigger.

The state of school recess is still terrible

While we're discussing old issues that haven't actually been resolved, Nancy Bailey would like to remind us about the dismal state of recess in US schools.

Doug Mastriano’s Rootin’ Tootin’ School Shootin’ Prevention Plan in PA

Heaven help us, but in PA we have what may be the worst MAGAfied gubernatorial candidate in the country. He has many, many bad ideas, but Steven Singer would like to talk about just one--arming everyone in schools to stop gun violence.

GOP proposes federal voucher program

Betsy DeVos is gone from DC, but her terrible national voucher plan now lives on. From me at Forbes.com

This Local Teacher Played Trombone in Zero Gravity for Science

Well, we need something pleasant, so here's a music teacher playing trombone in zero Gs (but, I would hope, four Fs). Plus, chance composition. 

A Transformational Art Project

This morning I made a brief appearance at a small but very special occasion. So I want to brag on my old school.

The woman in the photo is Rachelle Surrena, an art teacher at my old high school. Earlier this school year, she had a bit of an inspiration-- create a community-based mural to become a major piece of public art in our community. 

That may not be a big deal for those of you who life in big cities where public art is all over the place, but here we have only a handful of such things. 

She secured grant money. She rallied her high school art students, and with them settled on an idea to do something related to local culture and history. The class invited local historians to come speak to them; that's where I came in because I have written the book, literally, on the history of local musical groups. The students visited the local historical society, studied up on several ideas, came across an image they liked, and designed the project.

I'll tell you more about the image in the mural in a bit. 

There are several things to be amazed by. A mural project is about 50% artistry and 50% technical stuff. The students created the image, and then their teacher, with assistance from other teachers and resource people, figured out how to create the actual physical thing. Break the image into 48 three foot by three foot squares of a sort of poly fabric. Get the squares broken down into a sort of color by number scheme. Attach the finished squares to the wall.

The reach that Surrena put into this project is extraordinary, particularly when you consider that she married a local guy, but is not native to this small town. The local community theater, the Chamber of Commerce, city government, a charitable foundation, teachers, students all the way down to kindergartners-- and not only did she extend the reach of the project to the entire community, but she kept the students at the center of it throughout. If you could see more closely, you would find that the mural carries, subtly, the signatures of so many people who worked on it in some way. But it's the students who drove the bus--and that's so powerful.

Two students spoke today at the dedication, and I've read what some others had to say, and this has been a transformational project for them. They have learned about art, but also about teamwork and cooperation and coordinating the pieces of a large project and about their own community, That last part really resonates with me. For my years of teaching, I had students do a local history project based on primary sources, and the effect of learning community history is huge here in this little place where so many of our students come up thinking, "Well, I'm just from some dumb tiny nothing town." It's not that they learn that earth-changing things happened here, but that they see richness and roots and humanity in this place that belongs to them.

Add to that the public nature of this. The mural is on the side of our local community theater, in a well-traveled alley, across from a municipal parking lot. It will be seen . It will lend richness and beauty to what has always been a plain brick wall.

Add to that the recovered history that is there in that image. Let me tell you about the group represented here.

The late 19th/early 20th century was the heyday of town bands. In our county there were between 15-20 during that period. Only one of them was formed by Black musicians.

They were called the Sheepskin Band (a not-uncommon name in band history, referring to the material used for their drum head), and they were a small fife and drum corps. They were considered an important part of the local scene. They played concerts in the park, were hired for political rallies, appeared in regular parades. In 1910, local leaders promoted the Old Home Week with postcards adorned with pictures of local celebrities; the Sheepskin Band was on one of those postcards with the image that was adapted for this mural.

The band stopped functioning for a while because the house where the instruments were stored burned down. The local newspaper editor James Borland organized a drive to raise the money so that the band could be revived for the 1925 Old Home Week, and the newspaper promoted that fund drive relentlessly. The leader of the group was Wes Law, the bass drummer (famed, the newspaper said, for his double-drag over-the-top style), and there was concern in 1925 that Wes was getting too old and frail for the job. But Law told Borland, "I'm going to play if it kills me."

Wes Law passed away in 1932, and the band ended soon after. It's not an uncommon pattern with community groups in that period, particularly those that depend on a single person for leadership. Of the many bands in the county at the time, only one remains.

I don't want to idealize the Sheepskin Band's place in the community. They were beloved and respected, but they were also separate from the rest of the musical community, and they were largely lost to memory except for hobbyist-historians like me.

But they deserve to be remembered, and now they are a huge mural on the side of an important downtown building.

I presented a historical summary of the group this morning, having devoted my local newspaper column to that history a few months ago. The crowd gathered in the alley was a great representation of the community, including officials, teachers, families of the students, and descendants of the original Sheepskin Band members, several of whom shared with me that they had no idea that their grandparents and great-uncles had been in a big deal band back in the day. Lots of folks took pictures of the plaque with the mural; lots of folks took their pictures in front of the mural itself.

I have to emphasize this again--this was a student project, facilitated by a committed educator who dreamy big, inspired her students, and cleared a path for them to succeed. And unlike many student projects that have no life or reach outside the classroom, this both affected and was affected by the community. These students learned about their community, and they made it better. They found something, made art out of it, and put that art out in the world, and in the process strengthened the ties that hold that world together. 

I mean, damn-- I never miss teaching more than I do at moments like this. I never feel prouder of students and educators than at moments like this. Rachelle Surrena and her students and all the people who helped make this real are all my heroes right now. This is the real educational deal.