“Attorney General James Uthmeier is putting the Roman Catholic Church on notice,” the Orlando Sentinel reports. “[I]f church officials take taxpayer funded vouchers for their schools, they should accept vaccine exemptions for students, too.”
The “school choice” movement in the US supports tax-funded “vouchers,” targeted tax credits, and “charter” schools, on the theory that giving parents more options on where, how, and by whom their children are taught isn’t just a good thing, but a thing that government ought to be, and can legitimately be, involved in.
Unfortunately, the real effect of that kind of “school choice” is to turn all the available options into carbon copies of the “public” school system it supposedly helps parents and students escape.
According to the Sentinel article, half a million Florida students use the state-issued, taxpayer-funded vouchers to exercise “school choice,” including nearly 83,000 of Florida’s 94,000 Catholic school attendees.
So far as I can tell, Uthmeier has never publicly declared a formal religious affiliation, although he cites generic “Christianity” as underpinning America’s Constitution and system of government.
The country’s founders disagreed, stating clearly in 1797’s Treaty of Tripoli that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
Beyond his basic advocacy of Christianity, though, Uthmeier apparently considers his opinion on Catholic religious requirements more authoritative than the opinion of, um, the Catholic Church and the institutions it operates. Per the Sentinel piece, “Uthmeier, citing the Catholic Catechism, Pope Leo and scripture, argued Catholic doctrine does not allow its schools to reject vaccine exemptions for religious reasons.”
I’m neither a Catholic myself, nor well-educated in Catholic doctrine, and have no opinion on what that doctrine might imply about vaccination, but what we have here is not really a religious disagreement. It’s just Uthmeier announcing that, since the government pays the piper (with its subjects’ money), the government calls the tune.
Nor is the problem solely about religious schools. Any school that accepts taxpayer money finds strings attached to that money. We’ve already seen that happen with “private” college and university education.
When the GI Bill, Pell Grants, and government-guaranteed student loans started funding students at those “private” institutions, various government requirements on everything from accreditation to curriculum to race and sex discrimination came with those students and that money. The result: In terms of learning (as opposed to name, prestige, etc.), there’s probably little difference between attending most “private” versus “public” colleges or universities.
As soon as any activity starts getting its FUNDING through politics, its OPERATIONS become subject to the same politics.
For decades, the closest you could get to avoiding that problem was to homeschool, and even then government often stuck its nose into your choices. Now several states have added homeschooling to their “school choice” funding options … as long as the homeschoolers follow a government-approved schedule, use government-approved curricula, and administer government-approved tests.
While Uthmeier’s vaccine diktat inflames “separation of church and state” arguments, its only real solution is “separation of SCHOOL and state.”
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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