Bob Unruh – June 21, 2022
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled the state of Maine cannot discriminate against religious schools by excluding them from a state program that lets parents use vouchers to pay tuition for their children.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 6-3 majority opinion that explained Maine’s tuition program, which blocked the funds from being used at religious schools, cannot stand.
The ruling echoes a similar ruling from just a few years ago involving religious schools in Montana.
In the Maine case, a family argued that by excluding religious schools from the voucher program, the state was actively discriminating against religion.
Michael Bindas, an attorney for the nonprofit legal group Institute for Justice, argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs.
“Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” Roberts wrote in the case of Carson v. Maykin.
“Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”
Christopher Taub, the chief deputy attorney general for Maine, had claimed that the state shouldn’t be funding anything that instills religious beliefs, and that providing money for secular private schools does not do that, but that money going to religious schools does.
The state of Maine provides such vouchers to families of students who live where is no local public school to attend – but insisted that the vouchers not be used at religious or “sectarian” schools.
Roberts, during oral arguments, wondered openly about the state’s demands.
“You’re discriminating among religions based on their beliefs,” he said.