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Milwaukee’s school choice program shows that letting parents choose a moral ecology is how differing beliefs can coexist
By Patrick McIlheran
Remember the recent Lutherans-vs.-Catholics riots in Milwaukee? Mobs of men with clubs, smashed windows, people not daring to cross into the other tribe’s territory? The shelling and rockets?
Of course you don’t, because it never happened. Yet something like it seemed to haunt a dissenting U. S. Supreme Court justice last week. Stephen Breyer suggested, on the losing side of a school choice case, that we should trade away religious liberty to avoid religious strife.
Breyer was dissenting in Carson v. Makin, in which a 6-3 majority ruled in favor of parents’ power to choose a school for their children. Maine guarantees an education for all, but in towns that can’t afford a high school, it lets parents take state aid to a private school of their choice. For decades, however, it has barred parents from choosing religious schools. The state said it cannot accept that some parents might use the money for an education that mentions God.
Chief Justice John Roberts reminded Maine that the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that states need not give a particular public benefit, but when they do, they can’t exclude religious institutions. “There is nothing neutral about Maine’s program,” he wrote. “The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”
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