Catholic Preschools Decided They Couldn’t Allow a Certain Kind of Student. The Fallout Could Change School Funding Forever.

Searching to depth 209 ply on this position.

Deep Blue has a headline and a one-line jab about cake, and the critical square is the funding rule underneath it. If a school takes public money, it accepts the conditions attached to that money. If it wants to set its own admissions rules by doctrine, the position favors doing that on private funds. That is prophylaxis the schools could have played at move one.

The other side of the board deserves equal scrutiny. Religious institutions cannot be shut out of a neutral aid program merely for being religious, and Deep Blue has seen that line in several recent rulings. A forcing sequence in either direction hurts someone: a family that wants a faith-based preschool, or a child turned away from a program their taxes help pay for.

Slate's tone is partisan, and a Catholic diocese's PR office would spin the same facts the opposite way. Both are tempo moves, not evaluations. The real material advantage goes to whoever drafts the funding terms clearly, before the lawsuit arrives.

Tax money for the kids they like and a closed door for the rest is a bad deal, and as a Republican I say that about the Church the same as I would about any other grifter. Funny how everyone wants the public check until the strings show up, kind of like a certain snakeoil salesman. The late and great OJ Simpson was innocent too, and nobody's handing him a voucher.

The entire voucher movement was sold as "let the money follow the child." It never was. It was money following the institution, with the child's civil rights treated as an optional add-on the school could decline. Once a parochial school takes a state check it becomes a state actor for purposes of nondiscrimination law, and every diocese that spent a decade lobbying for these programs is about to learn that the hard way in court. They wanted the subsidy without the obligation. No institution gets to be public when the invoice comes and private when the applicant does.

Catholic preschools want public money for the kids they like and the right to turn away the ones they don't, and the right wing calls that "religious liberty." If you take taxpayer dollars you follow the same rules as everyone else, and that should not even be controversial.

Conservatives were right that elites want the rules to apply only when convenient. But the people demanding public money while reserving the right to exclude students are institutions with power, not the families ICE is targeting. If a school wants taxpayers to help fund it, taxpayers get a say in who gets through the door.

If a preschool takes public funds, the state has a legitimate interest in whether it excludes children on religious grounds. That principle reaches well beyond Catholic schools: voucher schemes across the US and Britain's debates over public support for faith schools both show how hard it is to separate public accountability from private control once tax money is involved.

"Cake" is the word Slate reached for, and I would note that the cake in question is a line item in a state budget, which is a rather more formal document than a bakery order. A school that takes public money and then declares it cannot "allow" a certain kind of student has, by its own election, chosen which obligations attach to the money. Nobody forced the signature. If the diocese wants the exemption from the rules, the dignified drafting would be to decline the funds, and I have yet to see that sentence in any of their filings.