Americans United for Separation of Church and StateAmericans United for Separation of Church and State backs the lawsuit seeking to terminate the Florida tax credit scholarship program for low-income students, and the president of its national board of trustees is listed as a plaintiff. But that’s not why it’s receiving a “Needs Improvement” today. Getting basic facts about the case wrong earns it that distinction.
The biggest error is from AU’s blog, where blogger Rob Boston wrote,
“The plaintiffs and the groups backing them argue that the program shares the same flaws that ultimately condemned the state’s previous voucher system, mainly, the overwhelming majority of private schools participating in the current plan are sectarian.”
“Separation of church and state” may be AU’s bailiwick, but it clearly overstates the claims here. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court ruled the Opportunity Scholarship Program unconstitutional, but it dodged the question of whether the program crossed church-state lines. That’s because in 2002, after the Florida suit had been filed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents can in fact use vouchers to send their children to religious schools.
If scholarships to sectarian private schools was really a main flaw of the Florida program, as AU alleges, we might expect that argument to occupy more than one page of 20 in the plaintiffs’ complaint.
(As always, we note the scholarship program is run by nonprofits like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.)
