Tangle - The SCOTUS religious school ruling.

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that Maine violated the Constitution when the state refused to make public funding available to students who attend religious schools. Plus, how to make a winning presidential candidate, and a special thank you from Isaac. You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

If you are listening to this podcast, then you are probably like me, constantly bombarded with news, updates, and emails. You can now take a break from the daily grind at Getaway. Just two hours outside most major cities, Getaway's cozy cabins offer the perfect blend of camping and comfort. These handcrafted hideaways are designed to be more than a destination, but a way to create distance from the relentless demands of work, schedules, technology, and, of course, political news. Each cabin offers everything you need and nothing you don't, including a kitchenette fit for cooking, a fire pit perfect for roasting s'mores under the stars, a private bathroom where you can enjoy a hot shower after a day in the outdoors, AC and heat to stay cool and cozy no matter the season,

and nearby nature trails for immersing yourself in the natural world. Ready to take time to unplug and unwind? Visit getaway.house and use promo code TANGLE to save $25 on your stay and enjoy more free time in the great outdoors. That's getaway.house, promo code TANGLE. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find

everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about the Supreme Court ruling in Maine, where there was a big conflict over school funding. Pretty interesting religious rights, separation of church and state issue. Before we get to that, though, I want to give a quick thank you to everybody who wrote in after yesterday's podcast. Lots of kind words inundated with positive feedback. It was really cool to see. I appreciate it. I'm doing totally okay. I think some people were a little worried about just generally how I was doing when a bunch of people unsubscribe. It's all part of the business. I was more frustrated than anything just because I want people to stick around even when they hear things they don't like.

So that was really where a lot of that was coming from, but so many kind words and notes and letters and just, yeah, thank you. It is incredible to see this community we're building. So we're going to jump in with some quick hits first. In North Dakota, Senator Kevin Cramer suffered a serious hand injury doing yard work that may require the amputation of a finger. Number two, the FDA is preparing to ban the e-cigarette maker Juul from U.S. markets and is also considering a cap on levels of nicotine allowed in tobacco products. Number three, Andrew Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee and Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Florida,

was hit with a 21-count federal indictment alleging wire fraud, conspiracy charges, and making false statements to the FBI. Number four, the House January 6th committee will hold its fifth public hearing today and has delayed next week's hearing until July in order to review new evidence. July in order to review new evidence. Number five, the town of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, says it will pay $3.25 million to the family of Dante Wright, who was shot and killed in a traffic stop last year. Number six, the Uvalde police chief, Pedro Arredondo, was placed on administrative leave after a Texas public safety official described a, quote, abject failure in the response to the Robb Elementary School shooting. All right, that is it for our quick hits, which brings us to today's main topic, the Supreme Court's ruling on religious schools in Maine.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that Maine violated the Constitution when the state refused to make public funding available to students who attend religious schools. The case, Carson v. Macon, challenged Maine's system for funding their most remote public education, which is designed to help students in rural and sparsely populated areas. When a district doesn't have its own secondary school, parents can either send students to other public or private schools designated by the district, and the state may help pay tuition if the school is accredited. If a student opts to go that route, they can seek out government funds, but may only attend schools that do not provide religious instruction.

Two main families challenged this law, saying the exclusion of religious schools from the tuition offerings violates the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, which guarantees the free exercise of religion. Meanwhile, the state has argued that funding religious schools would violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, which says Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion. The case hinged on the tension between these two First Amendment clauses. In a broad 6-3 ruling issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court agreed with the main families. In practical terms, the ruling means that if a state or local government decides to subsidize private schools, it must also allow families to use taxpayer funds to pay for religious schools too, according to SCOTUS blog. The ruling is another in a recent wave of victories for religious institutions,

and one of several that involved challenging state policies which barred them from receiving funding on grounds they offered religious education. Justice Roberts explained the ruling by saying that Maine will pay tuition for some students to attend private school so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion, he said plainly. It did not matter that the state's interest was providing students the equivalent of a fair secular public education. He also dismissed the idea that this would require the state to fund religious education, saying Maine could create more public schools or improve transportation servicing them if it didn't want to extend funding to private education, religious or not. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision upended constitutional doctrines

separating state and religion and warned about her growing concern for where the court will lead us next. In a moment, you'll hear some arguments from the right and the left, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. The right argues that the law was obvious discrimination against religious schools. They dismiss right argues that the law was obvious discrimination against religious schools. They dismiss the idea that the ruling will erode the separation of church and state. They accuse the left of claiming to oppose discrimination unless it was the religious kind. In NBC News, Ilya Soman said this was an important victory for the constitutional principle that the government may not discriminate on the basis of religion. It may also help open up valuable opportunities for parents and students,

particularly the disadvantaged, Soman said. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that a state-run voucher program may not exclude religious schools simply because of their status as religious institutions. As Chief Justice John Roberts reiterated in his opinion for the court Tuesday, a state may not withhold otherwise available public benefits from religious organizations simply because they are religious. Roberts also noted that discrimination on the basis of religion presumptively violates the clause protecting the free exercise of religion in the First Amendment and can only pass judicial scrutiny, i.e. be deemed constitutional, if it advances interests in the highest order and is narrowly tailored in pursuit of those interests. For example,

it would surely be unconstitutional for a state to give welfare benefits to Christians while denying them to otherwise eligible secularists, Soman wrote. While the state can choose not to establish welfare programs in the first place, if it does establish them, the beneficiaries can't be discriminated against based on religion. The same logic applies to tuition vouchers. The Deseret News editorial board said critics are falling back on a familiar chord. It will weaken the separation of church and state, they said. This simply isn't true. As the majority opinion in the separation of church and state, they said. This simply isn't

true. As the majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling said, quoting an earlier court ruling in a different case, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment protects against indirect coercion or penalties on the free exercise of religion, not just outright prohibitions. In particular, the ruling further stated, we have repeatedly held that a state violates the free exercise clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits. In other words, it may be wrong for the government to establish a favored religion, but it's equally wrong to penalize people because their religious preferences. Some people would remove religion entirely from the public square, the board added.

The founders never intended as much. Rather, religion, in its many forms and shades, should be part of the robust discussion that fills the public square and informs the public. Tuesday's ruling concerns itself with how children in rural parts of Maine receive an education. Because traditional public schools are scarce in parts of the states, the law allows tuition assistance to help people send their children to private schools near them. However, the law forbade people from using this money for tuition at religiously-based schools, even though those schools had qualified by either being accredited by the New England Association of Schools or by receiving approval from the Maine Department of Education. In the Washington

Examiner, Tim Carney accused the left of holding one form of discrimination dear. Maine has many small and shrinking towns, some of which are pretty isolated, he wrote. Rather than try to stand up or prop up unsustainable public schools where there are few students, Maine pays part of the tuition of parents in these rural towns to send their children to their private schools, but the law has two limitations. Parents must choose a school that is accredited by the regional accreditation body, and the schools cannot be religious. Parents could even send their children to school in Canada or Switzerland under this tuition program. They could use these tax dollars to send their children to all-girls schools or to French language schools, he added.

The schools eligible under this program could also be boarding schools. Schools receiving this money could have no set curriculum at all, as is the case for Blue Hill Harbor School, or they could be explicit culture warrior schools such as Walnut Hill School for the Arts. They just can't be sectarian, which means the institutions cannot profess a system of belief that involves God. This is obviously illegal discrimination, rooted in a history of unsavory anti-Catholic ideology. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left says the ruling erodes the protections in the First Amendment. Some say the problem may even end up being worse than we imagine.

Many argue it will leave taxpayers funding discrimination in education. In Bloomberg, Noah Feldman said the Supreme Court just eroded the First Amendment. It represents the end of the centuries-old constitutional ban on direct state aid to the teaching of religion, Feldman said, and remarkably, it does all this in the name of religious liberty, giving the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment primacy over the Establishment Clause found in the exact same amendment. The framers' conception of the two religion clauses of the First Amendment had two parts that fit together. The Establishment Clause meant the government couldn't make you perform a religious act or spend taxpayer dollars on religion.

The Free Exercise Clause said the government couldn't stop you from performing a religious act understood as prayer or preaching or teaching or belief. For most of U.S. history, the Supreme Court enforced these clauses by, among other things, saying that the government could not fund the teaching of religion in religious schools. That principle was substantially undermined 20 years ago, when the court held that states could fund religious education, including Catholic schools, indirectly via voucher programs that could be used at secular or religious private schools. But until today, the Supreme Court didn't go the next step, which has been sought by advocates of religious education ever since. It had never held that if the state pays for private secular education, it must, not may, also pay for religious education. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season?

Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. David Rothkopf said the separation of church and state is crumbling before our eyes. In the case of Carson v. Macon, the court ruled that public funds intended to support the education of Carson v. Macon, the court ruled that public funds intended to support the education of students for whom a public education option was not available must be

made available to parents who wish to use them to pay for religious schools' tuition, he wrote. In doing so, the court's conservative majority essentially ordered that taxpayer funds be used to support religious institutions. The decision is fraught with problems. In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer argued the very point of the Establishment Clause is to prevent the government from sponsoring religious activity itself, thereby favoring one religion over another or favoring religion over non-religion. This refers to the section of the First Amendment that prohibits Congress from establishing a state religion. Not only is Justice Breyer's argument sound, but if anything, it may understate the problem, Rothkopf wrote. That's because if states are permitted or even obligated in such a case to

fund a religious enterprise, they are likely to favor some religious groups over others, which is also to the detriment of those who eschew religion. But such funding also opens the door to government interference in the operations of religious groups. This fact is often overlooked by the advocates of permitting such funding. The state that can write the check can set the rules by which the check gets written or penalize religious groups whose activities fall out of favor. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern said this has the potential to dismantle secular public education in the United States. Just two decades ago, this claim would have been laughed out of court. SCOTUS only permitted states to subsidize religious schools in 2002. At the time,

it would have been absurd to say that states have a constitutional obligation to subsidize them, Stern wrote. Beginning in 2017, the court began to assert that states may not exclude religious schools from public benefits that are available to their secular counterparts. And in 2020, the conservative justices forced states to subsidize religious schools once they began subsidizing secular private education. Tuesday's decision in Carson takes this radical theory to a new extreme, ordering Maine to extend public education funds to religious indoctrination. The two Maine schools that may now receive public funding are openly discriminatory, expelling students and teachers who do not adhere to evangelical Christianity, Stern said.

LGBTQ students as well as straight children of same-sex couples are not welcome, nor are LGBTQ teachers. Even custodians must be born-again Christians. One school teaches students to refute the teachings of Islamic religion and believe that men serve as the head of the household. Another requires students to sign a covenant promising to glorify Jesus Christ and attend weekly religious services. is. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. I found it useful to look at Supreme Court rulings like this through two lenses. How does the ruling apply to the law, i.e. does it appear correct, and what are the practical implications of the ruling.

Often, I can see how a ruling can appear to be correct while also believing some of the consequences will be negative and unintended, and vice versa. In this case, I actually think the ruling makes a lot of sense, and I'm not so worried about the practical implications, though there are a couple of things to keep an eye on. For starters, everything about the system in Maine is complex and unique, as far as I can tell. To refresh, we are talking about the state providing tuition vouchers to students who don't have access to a public school in their immediate area. Those vouchers can be applied to public or private schools. They can even be applied to schools that are religiously affiliated or run by religious institutions. What they can't be applied to are schools that teach religious lessons. That does

seem like an obvious instance of discrimination to me. Maine made a decision to create a unique voucher system and then made a decision to exclude one kind of school, those that teach religion. If a school where students are allowed to create their own curriculum is allowed, which is the case here, I think a religious school should be too. When you think about the two First Amendment clauses and tension here, on a basic level, it seems clear to me one is more relevant than the other. By not allowing these vouchers to be applied to religious schools, I think the state of Maine is much closer to prohibiting the exercise of religion than it is to establishing or respecting a specific religion by allowing this program to be applied to religious schools. Even under Tuesday's decision, Maine can still restrict

vouchers to schools that fail to meet curriculum standards that apply equally to both religious and secular education. One example is that the state could require the teaching of evolution and biology class, and if the religious schools refused to teach it, they'd become ineligible for tuition vouchers. The state could also restrict funding for schools that discriminate based on sex or sexual orientation. It could apply this evenly across schools and thus exclude sectarian schools from the vouchers. That is to say, the state can still create its own standards for where its money goes. It is not being forced to fund these schools simply because they exist. All that being said, there are some things to keep an eye on. While this ruling will have a

narrow immediate impact, basically touching a couple of schools in rural Maine, the reverberations may be much stronger. For starters, the two schools in Maine receiving this funding do seem to hold some abhorrent and extreme views. It will be interesting to see how they jump through the hoops of state education standards. I wouldn't want my taxpayer dollars going to their funding, but that's also just part of life in America. There are a lot of things my tax dollars go to that I don't support. And it's worth repeating again that this is a voucher program. Tax dollars are funding programs that enable people to make choices you or I may disagree with. Disagreeing with a person receiving an education subsidy in rural Maine who sends their child to a school I find objectionable seems similar to disagreeing with a person receiving food stamps in Seattle who buys food I think is unhealthy.

Another area to keep an eye on is if this Supreme Court can start applying this principle of religious non-discrimination in a consistent way. As Ilya Soman, who supports the ruling, wrote, most egregiously, the Supreme Court in recent years upheld President Donald Trump's travel ban policy targeting migrants and refugees from Muslim countries on the theory that non-discrimination constraints don't apply to immigration restrictions to the same extent as other policies. But the right way to deal with that inconsistency is to end constitutional double standards in immigration policy, not to allow discriminatory policies elsewhere. Chief Justice John Roberts has said the rule established in this clause will only

kick in if a state starts sending taxpayer dollars to private schools through vouchers, credits, or scholarships. That will still have a huge impact on the majority of states who offer such programs right now. And it's possible some very negative unintended consequences come out of this ruling. States might, for instance, eliminate those programs in order to strictly fund public schools. That could have the very opposite effect of what many who support this ruling want, which is to create more school choice. At first glance, though, the court's view of this law as discriminatory makes sense to me and actually seems rather straightforward. The outcome of the ruling is much less clear, but I believe states will have room to set proper standards

for the kinds of things tax dollars will fund and the kinds of things they don't want them to. the kinds of things tax dollars will fund and the kinds of things they don't want them to. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Bill in Wayne, New Jersey. He said, if you were to put together the perfect presidential candidate to win, what attributes would you give them? Anything you think is important could be physical policies, personality, et cetera. This is a fun question. So, I mean, statistically speaking, on a totally superficial level, the answer is pretty simple. I mean, make them white, male, wealthy, and probably tall or all of the above. The better looking, the better. Those are the folks the U.S.

electorate has typically gone to. If I were being more thoughtful about it, though, I'd probably say something like this. I mean, first of all, race and gender matter less now than they ever have. In the television era, however, height maybe still seems important. There's a pretty strong correlation to, you know, candidates being tall and succeeding. They also must be a good orator or very entertaining on television or both. We live in an attention economy and politics is mostly a popularity contest and a communications competition. Some social science has demonstrated that most people make their minds up about candidates in the first few seconds they see them and their policies matter far less than we think. Policies do still matter, though, and that's where things get trickier.

I think in today's current political climate, specifically June of 2022, like this moment right now since things change fast, I'd say someone with a strong economics background and a plan for inflation, someone who loves capitalism but also hammers its manipulation by the super wealthy, someone who resists political correctness but is also an ally of marginalized groups and expresses great empathy for the poor, someone with a plan to address climate change and the rising cost of healthcare but who is an immigration restrictionist and a hawk on China and Russia. Bonus points if they have very moderate views on abortion, like being pro-choice in the first trimester, are open-minded about marijuana

legalization, and are calling for gun control reform. A candidate who has been affiliated with both parties may do well, though it's possible such a position could just totally backfire. A candidate who is anti-war, or at least opposed to more U.S. foreign intervention is a must in my opinion. They should probably have some religious affiliation. Being a churchgoer is usually good, but having extreme religious views that lead you to discriminate against LGBTQ people or other religions like Islam can get you in trouble pretty quickly. Basically, if the goal was to win, I'd try and create a candidate that I don't think really exists. All right, that is it for your questions answered, which brings us to our story that matters for the day. Yesterday, President Biden officially called on Congress to

suspend federal gasoline and diesel taxes until the end of September, saying such a move would be a relief to American consumers. The plan, which is unlikely to make it through Congress, was once criticized by Barack Obama as a gimmick and has been met with skepticism from economists. However, Biden says the move would provide temporary relief and buy time to solve the problem in a more holistic way. By suspending the 18-cent gas tax, federal gas tax, for the next 90 days, we can bring down the price of gas and give families just a little bit of relief, Biden said. I fully understand that a gas tax holiday alone is not going to fix the problem, but it will provide families some immediate relief, just a little bit of breathing room as we continue working

to bring down prices for the long haul. USA Today has the story and there's a link to it in today's newsletter. Next up is our numbers section. The number of private schools in the U.S. as of 2019 is 34,576. The number of students those schools serve is 4.9 million. The number of students enrolled in schools associated with the National Catholic Educational Association is 1.5 million. The number of traditional public schools in the U.S. as of 2018 is 91,328. The number of students enrolled in public schools in the fall of 2020 was 49.4 million. All right, that is it for our numbers section, which brings us to our have a nice day story. The United States' fourth largest city hasn't solved homelessness, but it is making remarkable

progress and soon could become an example for how other cities can best approach this national problem. Houston has been dismantling tent encampments that have become a sign of the homelessness crisis in many major cities, but instead of leaving people with no shelter, the city is moving them into one bedroom apartments, sometimes for a year and sometimes even longer. So far Houston has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and other housing, and the overwhelming majority have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless has been cut by 63% since 2011, which is more than twice the rate of reduction in homelessness as the rest of the nation over the last decade. The New York Times has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. decade. The New York Times has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter.

All right, everybody, that is it for the podcast. If you want to hear from us tomorrow, we've got a cool interview happening this afternoon. You've got to subscribe to get the email. We'll probably release it as a podcast, but you should subscribe anyway. ReadTangle.com slash membership. Go check it out. Go support our work. If not, either way, we'll see you on Monday. Peace. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova,

who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.