The News and Record ran a story with a screaming headline on the front page of its daily paper yesterday pronouncing the state paid $31 million to private and religious schools in Guilford County over the last year. This was obviously intended to activate the large local population ideologically enamored with public schools.
However, reading the article reveals an interesting conundrum. Placing 4th on the list of schools receiving taxpayer money was the Greensboro Islamic Academy. It received $2 million in state funds through the voucher/ Opportunity Scholarship program.
Many conservatives and Republicans are very supportive of this type of program. I have raised concerns in the past that it opens the door for state government to dictate to Christian schools what its curriculum will be. That will almost certainly happen when the socialists regain control of state government.
Opposition to governmental funding of Christian schools is a position that was elucidated by the prominent Christian theologian Gresham Machen nearly a century ago.
But few of us would have conceived decades ago, when these voucher programs were first germinating, that they would ultimately open the door to taxpayers funding Muslim schools. This is a very bad thing.
Yes indeed, that is a very bad thing. But politicians will do whatever is necessary when pressure is brought to bear .
I don’t feel great, Fred, about all the Christian schools taking the money. But we need to fix this somehow if Islamic schools qualify.
The competition and greater independence of thought produced by the voucher/Oportunity Scholarship program outweigh your concerns in my mind. The relative autonomy (~lack of bureaucracy) of private schools, including Christian and Islamic schools, is important to being better schools than the factory model of present-day government/public schools. The latter are the ones polluting our children’s minds with gender dysphoria, economic illiteracy, and general illiteracy. Non-government schools are much more accountable to the customer.
Furthermore, a Muslim parent and taxpayer has as much right to using a voucher at an Islamic school as a Christian parent/taxpayer has to use it at a Christian school or an Agnostic parent/taxpayer has to use it at a skeptical private school.
One may with better reason oppose immigration of Islamic people to the US on the basis of their beliefs being alien to the US Constitution. But once they are citizens, you cannot logically discriminate against them in the education they seek for their children.
You are right, J. Sobran, that under the Constitution and under current law, we cannot discriminate against Muslims with this program. That would once again raise the question as to whether the program needs to be terminated, or whether these non-discriminatory provisions somehow need to be changed. I am supportive of charter schools– lots of them– but am obviously concerned that this program will come back to bite us. The socialists would like little more than to eradicate the “independence of thought” and “relative autonomy” of Christian schools.