Washington-Oklahoma will not be able to launch the first religious public charter school in the nation after the Supreme Court stagnated 4-4 in an important case on the separation of the Church and the State.
The decision of the divided court means that a ruling of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma that said that the proposal to launch the Catholic School of San Isidor of Seville violates both the Federal Constitution and the state law.
As there was no majority, the Court did not issue a written decision, and the case does not establish a national precedent on the contentious legal issue of whether religious schools must be able to participate in state school programs financed by taxpayers.
A key factor in the result was that conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett, who would have been the decisive vote, did not participate in the case. She did not explain why, but it is likely to be for her ties with the Law Faculty of Notre Dame. The Religious Freedom Clinic of the Faculty of Law represents the Autonomous School.
It is likely that the court be asked to evaluate the issue in future cases.
St Isidore would have operated online throughout the state with a mandate to promote Catholic faith.
The case highlights tensions within the first amendment of the Constitution; A disposition, the establishment clause prohibits the state support of religion or the preference for one religion on another, while another, the free exercise clause, prohibits religious discrimination.
The Supreme Court of Oklahoma had cited the State’s interest in directing the violations of the establishment clause as a reason not to allow the proposal presented by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of the city of Oklahoma and the Diocese of Tulsa to move forward.
A State Board approved the proposal for St. Isidore in June 2023 despite concerns about its religious nature, which led the Oklahoma Gentner Drummond attorney to file a lawsuit.
The case saw Drummond on the opposite side to other Republicans in the state that supported the idea, but prevailed in the Supreme Court of Oklahoma the following year.
The Supreme Court, when Barrett participates, has a 6-3 conservative majority that often supports religious rights. In recent years, the free exercise clause has repeatedly strengthened in the cases presented by conservative activists of religious freedom, sometimes at the expense of the establishment clause. Some conservatives have complained for a long time that the common understanding that the establishment clause requires a strict separation of the Church and the State is incorrect.
The lawyers representing the school and the Board of the Charter School of Oklahoma throughout the State sought to portray the dispute as similar to a series of recent decisions in which the Court has said that, by virtue of the free exercise clause, states cannot prohibit religious groups of government programs that are open to all others.
The impulse of religious public charter schools fits the school’s choice movement, which supports parents who use taxpayers funds to send their children to private school. The defenders of public schools see both efforts as broad assaults on traditional public schools.
