We’ve got a bit more religion-related news than usual on today’s BradCast. But it’s not to celebrate the new Papal Conclave underway as of today at the Vatican. It’s because rightwingers in the U.S. are using phony claims of “religious bias” to rewrite Constitutional rights, freedoms, and the specific intentions of the Framers who wrote it. [Audio link to full story follows this summary.]
First up, before we get to our guest, some quick news, including some election news…
- After six months of trying to undermine democracy and invalidate tens of thousands of lawfully cast votes in North Carolina from last November’s election, Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin has finally conceded, giving up his post-election challenge against Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs who defeated him in last year’s election for state Supreme Court by 734 votes. Just two days after a Trump-appointed federal judge declared Griffin’s challenge — attempting to change the rules of an election after the election — to be unconstitutional, while giving him seven days to decide if he wanted to appeal, Griffin gave up the ghost. We’ve been covering the contest over the past six months and revisited its ugly details on yesterday’s BradCast on the heels of Monday’s federal court ruling. It took a while — and revealed a lot of villains in the Republican Party and on the NC Supreme Court — but Democracy has won this round, at least, in the last unsettled race of 2024.
- Speaking of Republican losers, despite an endorsement from the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance‘s half-brother, Republican Cory Bowman, was trounced on Tuesday by Aftab Pureval, the incumbent Democratic Mayor of Cincinnati in the city’s mayoral primary. Pureval defeated Bowman by nearly 70 points (82.5% to 12.9%) in the three way race. As the top two vote-getters, however, both will go on to compete head-to-head in November’s general election. Cincinnati hasn’t elected a Republican Mayor since 1967 and they don’t seem ready to do so again any time soon.
- On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court let its cruelty and corruption shine once again, by barring trans service members from serving in the military even while challenges are still underway in lower courts, despite many of those members serving openly and with distinction for years. That the Trump-packed SCOTUS would go along with his cruel mandate is not all that surprising. But the fact that they did so on an “emergency” basis, on the so-called “shadow docket”, without explanation or briefing or oral argument, even as trans service members had been suing — and winning — at the lower court level, is particularly galling and cowardly. All three of the Court’s liberal Justices dissented.
But, speaking of galling news from the High Court, last week, SCOTUS heard oral argument last week in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case engineered by rightwingers to challenge — really, to tear down — the Constitution’s First Amendment establishment clause meant to protect the separation of church and state.
The case involves a wannabe remote charter public school called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. It would be run by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in “deep red” Oklahoma. The state’s Charter School Board narrowly approved its application for public funding, despite its plans for “the evangelizing mission of the Church,” including “that God created persons male and female” and that those who reject the Holy Trinity will “end up in hell”. That approval would mean that, as a certified public school, it would receive taxpayer dollars in support of that “mission” whether taxpayers agreed with it or not.
While the state’s Republican Governor and Superintendent of Public Schools support the idea of publicly funding religious charter schools, both the state’s Republican Attorney General and its Republican-majority Supreme Court decidedly do not. The state Supremes blocked St. Isidore’s charter, citing both the First Amendment of the Constitution and state law which prohibits the expenditure of public money on any “sectarian institution” and requires that public schools be “free from sectarian control.”
That, in a state which has, in recent years, reduced some K-12 schools to just four days a week for lack of public money in the wake of GOP tax cuts. If SCOTUS reverses the state Supreme Court, as appeared likely during last week’s oral argument, money from secular public schools will be diverted to religious education. In fact, as my guest explains today, states across the nation are likely to be mandated to approve and pay for such religious institutions — even schools indoctrinating children into religions that today’s proponents of St. Isidore may not wish to see funded by taxpayer dollars.
We’re joined today by DANIEL MACH, Director of the ACLU’s Program for Freedom of Religion and Belief, which is supporting opponents of this radical assault on 250 years of American separation of church and state. The ACLU’s coalition includes Oklahoma faith leaders, parents, and public-education advocates, including national charter school advocate associations which object to turning public schools into Sunday schools.
“Oklahoma officials are not just blurring these lines separating church and state,” Mach wrote when sending up alarm bells about this case back in 2023, “they’re attempting to completely eviscerate them.” Our friend, legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern of Slate argues that this case is likely to “bury what remains of church–state separation, forcing every American to subsidize the indoctrination of children into faiths they may not share. And it would further enfeeble secular public education, diverting billions of dollars away from inclusive public schools toward religious academies that openly discriminate against those outside their faith.”
But there is hope. A little. Justice Amy Coney Barret has recused from the case, meaning that if Chief Justice John Roberts — the only Justice who appeared to be at least moderately uncertain of his final verdict last week — decides in favor of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, then SCOTUS would be tied 4 to 4 and the Oklahoma high court’s ruling would stand.
“This was a strong decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court,” Mach tells me today, explaining that their opinion “wasn’t even close”, pronouncing the Charter Board’s decision as “so far beyond the pale…so far beyond what we have decided as a country that our government should and should not be doing” that even a Republican high court in a very Republican state had to say no to it.
“It’s an interesting moment,” says Mach, “because we have a conservative movement and an extremely conservative U.S. Supreme Court that supposedly cares about states’ rights. But a ruling for the Catholic school here would be giving no weight to Oklahoma state statutes, the Oklahoma constitution, the Oklahoma Republican Attorney General, and the state Supreme Court, which interpreted its own state law. All of which made absolutely clear that charter schools in Oklahoma are public schools.”
There is much more in my conversation with Mach today that you’ll want to tune in for, much of which defies conventional wisdom about all of this…even if it may not be enough to prevent the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court from further undermining the Constitution and the original intention of its Framers. That, he says, would be not just a “seismic shift in the law”, but “a ground-breaking disaster”…
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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