Washington (AP) – The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to tackle a fresh cultural war dispute: whether the opening of the first publicly financed religious charter school in the country in Oklahoma should be allowed.
The judges said they were checking a decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, with which the approval of a state committee for an application by the Catholic Church in Oklahoma was declared invalid at the opening of a charter school.
The conservatively dominated Supreme Court has made several decisions in recent years in which he expressed his willingness to let public funds flow to religious organizations. At the same time, conservatively guided countries have tried to introduce religion in public schools, including Louisiana’s demand to hang up ten commandments in classrooms.
The case is expected to be negotiated at the end of April and decided in early summer. Judge Amy Coney Barrett does not participate in the case, but did not explain why.
Last June, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court decided with 7 to 1 votes that a religious charter school financed by the taxpayer would violate the part of the first constitutional additive to prohibit the government of “respecting a religious site”.
The decision was followed by a 3-2 vote by the StateWide Virtual Charter School Board in 2023 to approved an application from the archdiocese for the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School. The K-12 online school had planned to start teaching for their first 200 participants last autumn with the aim of evangelating their students in Catholic faith.
A group of parents from Oklahoma, faith leaders and a non -profit public educational organization filed a lawsuit to block school.
“According to Oklahoma’s law, a charter school is a public school,” judge James Winchester, a representative of the former Republican governor Frank Keating, wrote in the majority opinion of the court. “Therefore, a charter school must be unsettled.
“However, St. Isidore will evangelize the curriculum of the Catholic schools with state support.”
In contradiction to this, judge Dana Kuehn wrote that the exclusion of St. Isidore would violate the operation of a charter school solely because of his religious affiliation against another part of the first constitutional addition that protects religious freedom.
The Supreme Court’s decision to intervene was positively admitted by Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal representation, which represents the State Council. “There is a great irony in the fact that state officials who claim to support religious freedom discriminate against St. Isidore because of his Catholic faith,” said the group’s chief law consultant, Jim Campbell.
Opponents of the Oklahoma Charter School asked the judges to maintain the judgment of the State Court. “The law is clear: charter schools are public schools and must be secular and open to all students,” said the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal groups in a statement. They represent the school’s opponents in a separate legal dispute.
The case brings Oklahomas Republican governor Kevin Stitt and his Republican General Prosecutor Gentner Drummond aside. Stitt prefers the school. Drummond reversed the advice of his republican predecessor to the charter school authority and warned that the Catholic charter school would in his opinion violate the constitution.
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