This commentary is by Meg Mott, professor emeritus at Marlboro Institute at Emerson College, Putney’s town moderator, and a Braver Ángels ambassador.
A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on tax credits for a state-run scholarship program may force Vermont’s hand when it comes to school vouchers.
In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Roberts Court ruled that states could no longer prohibit the use of public funds for religious schools. If educational subsidies are available for parents to send their kids to private schools, they must be made available for parents who wish to send their kids to religious schools.
In Vermont, the response to the Espinoza rule has been energetic. Parents in Mount Holly have filed a suit against the Agency of Education, Valente v. French, arguing that Espinoza allows them to receive school voucher funds to send their son to the Roman Catholic Mount St. Joseph Academy in Rutland. The current policy that restricts vouchers to secular schools, they claim, is unconstitutional.
Against that claim, former Vermont education secretary Rebecca Holcombe co-authored an op/ed in USA Today arguing that states could still place limits on what private schools do with the money. For instance, the state could demand that religious schools did not discriminate against LGBTQ persons. But the decision in Valente might foreclose that option. If that’s the case, Holcombe concludes, Vermont has only one choice: “End charter schools and publicly financed private school tuition altogether.”
I have sympathy for both positions. The right to educate one’s children according to one’s religious beliefs is older than the Constitution. St. Thomas Aquinas listed that parental right as one of five natural rights that all just leaders must obey. By the same token, the right to an education that affirms a young person’s sexuality is also a natural right. Aquinas listed self-preservation as the cardinal right. A student’s self is preserved when it feels loved and respected.
So how can these two fundamental rights coexist? Prior to Espinoza, states had some latitude to decide. States run by Democrats could deny public funds to religious schools and states run by Republicans could allow them. But that doesn’t really solve the problem. Instead, it only intensifies political polarization within each state.
Instead of flaming the fires of another battle in the endless culture wars, I recommend trying something different.
As a lesbian in a long-term relationship, with two kids in a public school in a conservative town, I had firsthand experience with evangelical intolerance. What I discovered is that strong difference of opinion does not preclude real friendship.
My neighbor, who lived on the other side of the Green River, had spent the first half of his life as an engineer, then converted hard to Christianity after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs in World War II. By the early 1990s, he was active in the Take Back Vermont movement, a grassroots opposition to Vermont’s civil union laws. He self-published pamphlets, illustrated with Christian families who were under attack from politicians who supported unholy unions.
Luckily, we both enjoyed a good theological debate. And it was through our discussions on the tensions between natural law and divine law that we gained mutual respect.
After one of our energetic disputes, he published a pamphlet that included both his arguments against gay marriage AND a beautiful description of our outside wedding ceremony. Without any judgment, he told the story how “the girls” were tying the knot. Instead of intensifying the culture wars by dehumanizing his lesbian neighbors, he humanized all of us. Yes, he was against same-sex marriage AND he loved the girls next door. Those two positions did not have to cancel each other out.
A similar capaciousness took place in Utah in 2015. After years of hostility, a group of conservative lawmakers and LGBT activists were able to come to an agreement that served the needs of both sides. Known as the “Utah Compromise,” the Antidiscrimination and Religious Freedom Amendments expanded nondiscrimination laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity AND exempted religious organizations from following those laws when they violated a fundamental teaching of the faith. Yes, a same-sex couple could be denied housing at Brigham Young University, but workers would no longer be fired for speaking their mind or expressing their values on political or religious topics outside the workplace.
Jonathan Rauch, in a recent Deseret essay, describes the Utah Compromise as a “miracle.” Not only did two political antagonists make space for the other, they both felt empowered by the new legislation. “We found a way forward,” Troy Williams, the executive director of Equality Utah, told Rauch, “where each entity was given additional rights and protections, but no one’s core values were compromised.”
His Mormon counterpart agreed. “Getting this bill isn’t just getting this piece of paper,” Sen. Jim Dubak told a New York Times reporter. “It’s about changing the culture in Utah so we can have all these bedrock values we all believe in: respect, civility and understanding each others’ perspective.”
Our pluralist democracy requires all of us to be expansive enough to hold different points of view in our minds at the same time. Were it not for business interests and foreign adversaries who profit from the culture wars, we might be more willing to leave the deeply rutted battlefield and try talking across the divide.
The good news is that this emerging debate over school funding gives us a chance to be bigger than one side, if we let Utah lead the way.
Instead of pitting religious liberties against gay rights, try imagining how they can coexist. Think of it as a cultural exchange program within a supervisory union. What could young gay activists learn from their religious, conservative peers? What counter-arguments do religious students need to consider?
I can imagine vibrant intermural debates where students from St. Michael’s School debate students from Brattleboro Union High School about constitutional questions. No doubt we would all learn something new about faith and reason and how young citizens find their feet in this confusing, contradictory and immensely compelling world.
Unlike the deadening rhetoric of the culture wars, we might actually be surprised.
