The AP reports about a critically important lawsuit the state of Oklahoma has filed against a Catholic Christian nationalist group that intends to use taxpayer money to fund a religious school. This case will wind up in the USSC in the next year or two. If the USSC says it is OK to force taxpayers to pay for religious education, it will open the way for diversion of tens of billions of tax dollars to prop up religion.
That would be a serious, maybe lethal, blow to American secular democracy. Civil liberties that God hates will also be severely weakened as church schools will be free to discriminate against anyone for any reason that God finds objectionable, e.g., children in pro-abortion families, women generally, racial minorities, Muslims, and same-sex couples and their children. The AP writes:
Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Friday sued to stop a state board from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school after the board ignored Drummond’s warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions.
Drummond filed the lawsuit with the Oklahoma Supreme Court against the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board after three of the board’s members this week signed a contract for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School, which is sponsored by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.
“Make no mistake, if the Catholic Church were permitted to have a public virtual charter school, a reckoning will follow in which this state will be faced with the unprecedented quandary of processing requests to directly fund all petitioning sectarian groups,” the lawsuit states.
The approval of a publicly funded religious school is the latest in a series of actions taken by conservative-led states that include efforts to teach the Bible in public schools, and to ban books and lessons about race, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Oklahoma’s Constitution specifically prohibits the use of public money or property from being used, directly or indirectly, for the use or benefit of any church or system of religion. Nearly 60% of Oklahoma voters rejected a proposal in 2016 to remove that language from the Constitution.
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A key tool in America's authoritarian radical right (ARR) war to kill democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties is to foster as much divisive disinformation, lies, slanders and crackpot reasoning as possible. In my opinion, disinformation constitutes one of the top two weapons that the American ARR movement has in its democracy kill agenda. The other main weapon is lots of money to corrupt society and government.
The key deceit that maintains the power of disinformation is the ARR's constant cynical and flawed implicit argument that disinformation is harmless "conservative" free speech. ARR radicals have to ignore and even deny the harm in ARR disinformation because without it the ARR cause would be lost. The anti-democracy radicals know they cannot win on the merits, so they have no choice but to rely heavily on disinformation just like tyrants such as Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Mao, Xi Jinping and nearly all other tyrants.
In a surprise decision, three of the six ARR judges on the USSC sided with the three non-ARR judges (Democrats), holding that the US government can interact with social media outlets to try to coax them to tone down the tsunami of anti-democracy disinformation that has poisoned all major social media platforms. Scripps News writes:
Justices said the Biden Administration could continue to pressure social media firms over misleading content while a lawsuit progressesThe Supreme Court on Friday said it would indefinitely block a lower court order curbing Biden administration efforts to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security.
The justices said they would hear arguments in a lawsuit filed by Louisiana, Missouri and other parties accusing administration officials of unconstitutionally squelching conservative points of view. The new case adds to a term already heavy with social media issues.
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have rejected the emergency appeal from the Biden administration.
“At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate,” Alito wrote in dissent.
Alito's dissent is a clear example of cynical, lying ARR elites ignoring the vast damage that anti-democracy disinformation has inflicted on American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. They always couch attempts to tamp down anti-democracy, pro-tyranny disinformation as implicitly harmless speech, news and information.
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American Christian nationalism (CN) is an ARR anti-democracy, pro-theocracy religious and social movement. In the modern GOP, CN fundamentalist dogma and brass knuckles capitalist dogma dominate the beliefs and propaganda coming from ARR elites and their propagandists and major donors.
The CN movement relies heavily on disinformation to impose its theocratic agenda on America, prominently Christian Sharia law and wealthy White male Christian Taliban enforcement of it. With the CN movement, lies of omission (hiding inconvenient truth) are about as common as affirmative lies and falsehoods. In my opinion, heavy reliance on disinformation is a hallmark of cynicism and moral rot. An opinion piece in the NYT touches on one aspect of CN moral rot:
In fact I’d argue that the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia may well be the most consequential education scandal in the United States, not simply because the details themselves are shocking and appalling, but because Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head.
Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education. The education department has been investigating violations of the Clery Act, a federal statute that requires federally funded colleges and universities to publicly report data about campus crime. To put that number into perspective, consider that Michigan State University paid $4.5 million for its own “systemic failure” to respond to the infamous Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, in which Nassar was convicted of sexually abusing dozens of women in his care. While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.
The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”
A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”
If this was the only scandal at Liberty, it would and should be a national story. But it’s not the only scandal. Far from it. I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.
In 2021, ProPublica published a comprehensive, gut-wrenching report describing how Liberty mishandled claims of sex abuse and sex harassment on campus and used its strict code of conduct, the Liberty Way, against victims of sex abuse. If, for example, a victim had been drinking or engaged in any other conduct prohibited by Liberty policies, those details in their sex abuse complaint could be used against them in school disciplinary proceedings.
Liberty has faced a series of lawsuits related to those claims, and last year it settled one of those cases. Throughout these controversies, Liberty has responded by denying many of the worst allegations against it.
But there’s another group that will be angry as well — at yet another attack on an evangelical institution in a powerful secular newspaper. That anger, though, is a key part of the problem with the American church, and it’s a problem that no less a Christian figure than the apostle Paul identified almost 2,000 years ago.
In his first letter to the Corinthian church (or, as Trump might say, One Corinthians), he issued a ferocious denunciation of sexual immorality inside the church. In chapter five, he says that he’s heard of misconduct “of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate.” He’s condemning an act of incest within the church, but if you read the accounts of incidents at Liberty, you’ll read stories of gross misconduct that Christians and non-Christians alike should and do find utterly abhorrent.
No wonder that many people have lost faith in government. It doesn't work mostly for the public interest any more, assuming it ever did. It works for powerful special interests, the morally rotted CN movement in this case.
Q: Why are US taxpayers funding a morally rotted, ARR anti-democracy CN university that breaks laws by hiding inconvenient truth, i.e., are we disinformed via lies of omission, is government corrupt, is the MSM incompetent or quietly complicit, is the ARR CN movement powerful, or some of all of that?
(A: probably some of all of that)
