Surprise: SCOTUS Rules For Religious Liberty In Montana Scholarship Case, 5-4https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/06/30/surprise-scotus-rules-religious-liberty-montana-scholarship-case-5-4/Will the Washington Post laud John Roberts’ independence after today’s ruling in Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue? Don’t hold your breath, but religious schools can breathe a little easier after this 5-4 decision. Once states set up scholarships for students, they cannot deny them on the basis that the money might go to religious schools chosen by the students or parents.
It’s yet another blow to the Blaine Amendments in several states:
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Interestingly, Roberts barely touches on the Blaine Amendments in his opinion, with only two brief references. Justice Samuel Alito argues much more specifically about the malevolent nature of Blaine Amendments:
Backers of the Blaine Amendment either held nativist views or capitalized on them. When Blaine introduced the amendment, The Nation reported that it was “a Constitutional amendment directed against the Catholicsâ€â€”while surmising that Blaine, whose Presidential ambitions were known, sought “to use it in the campaign to catch antiCatholic votes.†...
Montana’s no-aid provision was the result of this same prejudice. When Congress allowed Montana into the Union in 1889, it still included prominent supporters of the failed Blaine Amendment. ... Montana thereafter adopted its constitutional rule against public funding for any school “controlled†by a “sect.†Mont. Const., Art. XI, §8 (1889). There appears to have been no doubt which schools that meant. As petitioners show, Montana’s religious schools—and its private schools in general—were predominantly Catholic, see Brief for Petitioners 42, and n. 41, and anti-Catholicism was alive in Montana too.
Basically, the ruling is that the intent of
Blaine Amendment language is not to prevent the establishment of a religion but to attack free exercise of religion, historically, Catholics. One thing particularly interesting to me as a "graduated" homeschooling parent is that anti-Catholic forces of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries tried to go even farther than this. Two foundational USSC rulings establishing parents' rights to oversee the education of their children are Pierce vs. the Society of Sisters and Wisconsin Vs. Yoder. In Yoder, parents' rights were specifically recognized and protected (the Yoder family was probably not Catholic, but parents entangled by what probably had been an anti-Catholic law). The issue in Pierce was that the State of Oregon had outlawed private schools (using general language to smokescreen the fact that the law's target was
Catholic parochial schools. So dismantling Blaine Amendment language - found in many/most states' constitutions, including California's - is part of a larger dismantling of anti-Catholic measures of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. A long time coming, to be sure.
