Since Feb. 28, Alabama’s news media has been abuzz with stories about the state Legislature’s passing a bill providing public tax credits for private and parochial schools. Unfortunately none of the stories have called attention to the fact that the bill violates the religious liberty of every Alabamian as set forth in the 1901 Alabama Constitution.
Most of the news stories focused instead on the charges and counter-charges by political heavyweights within the state.
Gov. Robert Bentley called the tax credit bill “the most significant piece of legislation that’s been passed in this Legislature in years.” Evidently his fellow Republicans agree because they have been bragging about how they used pure power to force the secretly rewritten bill about when to begin the school year into a bill providing tax credits to private and parochial schools.
So much for transparency in government.
On the other side, the Alabama Education Association (AEA) claims the procedures used to pass the bill violated the open meetings law as if AEA has not stooped to political tricks of its own when it was all-powerful in the state Legislature.
Now the courts are in the fight. Circuit Judge Charles Price of Montgomery issued a restraining order preventing Gov. Bentley from signing the law. Republicans say the restraining order is political because Price is a Democrat. Republican legislative leaders Mike Hubbard, speaker of the House, and Del Marsh, president pro tem of the Senate, call Price’s ruling “judicial activism at its worst.” They want the Alabama Supreme Court, which is all Republican, to set Price’s restraining order aside.
It is sad when even the rulings of the courts are tinged with political overtones rather than with confidence in unbiased justice, but that is another issue.
Surprisingly no one has talked about the violation of religious liberty that occurs when public tax dollars are channeled into church-related causes. Article I, Section 3 of the Alabama Constitution is titled Religious Liberty and says, in part, “No one shall be compelled by law to attend any place of worship; nor to pay any tithes, taxes, or other rate for building or repairing any place of worship, or for maintaining any minister or ministry.”
The words are clear — no taxes for maintaining a church-related ministry. Yet that is exactly what tax credits are. It is a dollar-for-dollar benefit from taxes owed the state. In this case, it is taxes that would have been used for public education that can be channeled to a church ministry — a parochial school.
Parochial schools exist as a way of inculcating the doctrines and beliefs of the sponsoring church body. That is why they require Bible classes, teach church doctrine and engage in worship according to the dictates of the sponsoring faith.
Yes, many parochial schools provide wonderful education. Personally, close family members attended and graduated from Christian schools in this state. But the quality of the education does not trump the inaliable right of religious liberty.
Baptists have long understood that to use public tax money to support a religious ministry is a violation of religious liberty. That principle is enshrined in the Alabama Constitution. It does not matter if the religious ministry is sponsored by Baptists or Presbyterians or Catholics or Seventh-day Adventists or whomever. Public tax money should not flow to religious ministries. Yet that is exactly what the Alabama Legislature has approved and the governor is eager to sign.
One legal scholar recently illustrated the impact of tax credits by using the example of crucifixes. “Assume a state wishes to subsidize the ownership of crucifixes,” wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. She explained that a state could purchase them in bulk and distribute them; it could reimburse buyers with a check; or it could pay with a tax credit.
In all three cases, the state would be advancing a policy of supporting religion with public money and that is a violation of religious liberty. Tax credits to parochial schools are nothing more than what one writer called a “silly distinction” to allow government to use its taxing power to support religious ministries.
That this point was never raised in the debate in Montgomery or in the state’s news media is both surprising and disappointing.
Unfortunately it is likely that nothing can be done about the Legislature’s action. A U.S. Supreme Court case titled Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn effectively eliminated the ability of citizens to challenge tax credit schemes by eliminating taxpayer standing to bring cases. Now a state legislature can avoid a constitutional challenge simply by using tax credits instead of a direct appropriation. That is what the Alabama Legislature did.
A technical point about legal methodology prevents an examination about the legal merits of the case. That is unfortunate.
If the bill is allowed to go the governor, Alabama will join a growing list of states with a controversial school-funding program that funnels public money to private and religious institutions in the form of tax credits. That this could happen in Alabama where we vigorously resist efforts by other government entities to limit religious freedom is the greatest of ironies. That this could happen in a state where Baptists, the champions of religious liberty, are the predominate religious group, is equally astonishing.
It illustrates the difference between valuing religious liberty in theory and actually protecting that liberty in practice.
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