For the fifth time, religious activists are trying to add sectarian schools to a Maine law that allows parents to send their kids only to private secular high schools at taxpayer expense if public secondary schools don’t exist in their areas.

The law has always specifically excluded religious schools, and the four previous attempts to expand the law in favor of faith-based schools were declared unconstitutional in both federal and state courts.

Yet, the Christian Right keeps ignoring this reality and continuously tries to chip away at church-state separation, including orchestrating the 2001 Supreme Court decision — Good News Club v. Milford Central School — that now legally allows before- and after-school religious club functions on school grounds.

I have written before about these attempts by evangelical Christian organizations to insinuate religious doctrine and practices in American schools in a February post titled “School Proslytizers Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” and in July with “The ‘Good News Club’ is Bad News for Kids.”

This time around, three secular-rights groups — the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Maine, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) — filed a motion in late October to intervene in Carson et al. v. Hasson on behalf of several taxpayers served by the affected Regional School Unit 12 in the area. The interveners join the office of the Maine Attorney General, which represents defendant Dr. Robert Hasson Jr., commissioner of the state’s Department of Education.

The new case, filed in federal court by the Institute for Justice and the First Liberty Institute, demands that the Maine law be expanded to include two specific rural religious schools — Bangor (Maine) Christian Schools and Temple Academy in Waterville.

AU’s Church & State monthly magazine reported in its December edition that:

“Both schools would use the taxpayer-funded tuition to teach students religious doctrine and train them in religious rites and observances.”

This is not an arbitrary worry, the magazine reports, citing a quote from the Rev. Jerry Mick of Bangor Baptist Church, which oversees Bangor Christian Schools. The pastor told a reporter for the Bangor Daily News that the school teaches students to revile same-sex couples and homosexuality as biblically immoral.

“We teach abstinence and that sex comes before marriage, not before,” the Rev. Mick said. “We teach moral values. We believe homosexuality is a perverse lifestyle. Our curriculum, even in science and math, is Christ-centered.”

The Church & State article reported that Alex J. Luchenitser, American United’s associate legal director, layed out the claims for intervention. Luchenitser said:

“It is a fundamental violation of religious freedom to force Maine taxpayers to support education in religious beliefs which they do not hold. And taxpayers should never be compelled to support discrimination, which some private religious schools practice.”

Scorning homosexuals would presumably fall under than claim.

The article notes that the ACLU and AU also argue that forcing a state to fund religious training would be “a perversion of the U.S. Constitution.”

The question is why an issue already decided to identical result four times before needs again to be relitigated in court?

Enough already.

But evangelical Christians who dream of a theocracy in America are nothing if not persistent.

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