Supreme Court takes up Catholic preschools' fight with Colorado
The U.S. Supreme Court hears argument on Nov. 3 in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, brought by the Archdiocese of Denver and Catholic preschools excluded from Colorado's free universal preschool program. The preschools say the state's refusal to exempt them from a nondiscrimination rule covering LGBTQ families is religious discrimination; Colorado says every publicly funded preschool, religious or secular, must follow the same equal-opportunity requirements. Read at SCOTUSblog →
The Blaine Amendment
What happened then
In 1875, Rep. James G. Blaine of Maine proposed a constitutional amendment barring public money from going to schools controlled by any religious denomination. It passed the House overwhelmingly in August 1876 but fell short of the two-thirds it needed in the Senate.
What caused it
Public schools of the day often opened with readings from the Protestant King James Bible, which Catholic families objected to. As Catholic immigration grew, Catholics built their own parochial schools and asked for a share of school funds. President Ulysses S. Grant, in an 1875 speech to a veterans' gathering, urged that no public money go to sectarian schools.
How it was resolved
The federal amendment died, but the idea did not. Many states wrote similar no-aid provisions into their constitutions in the decades that followed, and some new states were required to adopt them to join the Union.
How it turned out
Supporters saw these provisions as protecting public schools and the separation of church and state; critics, then and now, saw anti-Catholic motives behind them. The question returned to the Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022), which held that states can't shut religious schools out of aid programs open to other private schools. The Colorado case asks how far that principle reaches.
Sources: Wikipedia: Blaine Amendment · Espinoza v. Montana (2020), opinion · Carson v. Makin (2022), opinion
Further reading: The Bible, the School, and the Constitution by Steven K. Green