Maine churches continue legal fight to maintain taxpayer-funding bigotry

Maine says private schools can get tax dollars as long as they don't discriminate. Two bigoted churches want the money anyway.

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Churches in Maine are going to court (again) to argue that non-discrimination laws passed by lawmakers unfairly target them and their faith-based bigotry. Those laws, they claim, make it impossible for them to make use of taxpayer dollars that the Supreme Court said they could use to fund their religious indoctrination.

It’s all absurd but it’s the latest volley in a years-long back-and-forth battle between Maine legislators, Christian school administrators, and federal judges.

Red backpack with Bible (image via Shutterstock)

Let’s rewind the tape a bit:

In 2022, the Supreme Court heard a case called Carson v. Makin that involved a voucher program allowing students in rural parts of Maine to have access to free education, even if that meant attending a private school. (They allowed this because there simply weren’t enough public schools in certain parts of the state to guarantee every child a free education.)

The state already said it would cover private school tuition, even at church-run schools, as long as the education students received was secular in nature. But a lawsuit was filed by parents who wanted to send their kids to Christian schools that, among other things, promoted Creationism and discriminated against LGBTQ people in hiring. Maine wasn’t allowing taxpayer dollars to go there.

The Supreme Court essentially said in its horrible decision that the state was forbidden from discriminating against those schools on the basis of religion… which meant taxpayers would theoretically have to pay for religious indoctrination. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put in her dissent, “Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”

But here’s the amazing thing: Lawmakers in Maine anticipated that outcome and took action to nullify the Supreme Court’s decision—at least in their state. Simply put, rather than stick with the previous law that banned money from going to explicitly religious schools, which was clearly now in legal jeopardy, they passed a new law forbidding any taxpayer dollars from going to schools that discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. (More specifically, they expanded their anti-discrimination law to protect LGBTQ people—including at schools that are part of the voucher program.)

See? No religion involved.

That move forced the Christian schools at the center of that legal battle, Temple Academy in Waterville and Bangor Christian Schools, to make a decision about what mattered more to them: taxpayer-funded tuition dollars or faith-based bigotry?

Both schools already told the Supreme Court that bigotry was vital to their mission and that they would not alter how they operated in order to receive public funding.

The end result was that, by August of 2022, only one Christian school (the Jesuit-based Cheverus High School) had opted into the voucher program—and it wasn’t even one of the schools that filed the Supreme Court lawsuit. Everyone else decided they would rather discriminate than take state funding.

In March of 2023, the church that ran the Bangor Christian Schools, Crosspoint Church, sued the state again. They complained that the new law included a “poison pill” that amounted to religious discrimination.

Until recently, the state also exempted religious schools from certain nondiscrimination provisions to accommodate their religious beliefs… The exemption previously covered all religious schools, but the amendment narrowed it to protect only religious schools that do not participate in the tuitioning program. Without the exemption, religious schools are subject to investigations, complaints, and large fines for offering instruction consistent with their sincerely held religious beliefs. This “poison pill” effectively deters religious schools from participating and thereby perpetuates the religious discrimination at the heart of the sectarian exclusion.

That was a lot of legalese to say something very basic: These Christians wanted to perpetuate bigotry and get rewarded for it. They were furious that the state was putting civil rights over their desire to promote faith-based hatred—or, as they euphemistically called it, their “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

The lawsuit went on to say that the “poison pill” prevented BCS “from teaching from its religious perspective,” as if anti-LGBTQ bigotry was core to everything they did. They also claimed the law wasn’t “generally applicable” (and therefore legal) since it applied to any school that accepted males and females—which meant faith-based, single-sex schools that discriminated against LGBTQ people would be eligible for the tuition money. If they could have the money, the lawsuit said, we should have access to it too.

Maine’s Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a statement at the time, “If abiding by this state law is unacceptable to the plaintiffs, they are free to forego taxpayer funding.”

This past February, a U.S. District Court judge shot down the lawsuit, saying that Crosspoint Church was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.” There was nothing inherently anti-religious about non-discrimination laws that applied to everyone; more importantly, those laws regulated conduct, not speech or beliefs. In other words, the Christians running the school could absolutely deny the existence of trans people or believe that being gay or lesbian is a sin—your bigoted beliefs are still legal!—but they couldn’t receive taxpayer dollars if they refused to admit LGBTQ students.

But even in the ruling, the judge admitted this was a “prelude” to an appeal, and that the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit would eventually have to issue a more “authoritative ruling.”

That appeal has now been filed by the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute.

In it, they argue that Maine’s law violates the First Amendment’s “Free Exercise” and “Free Speech” clauses, as if non-discrimination laws hinder their ability to be truly Christian.

Excluding BCS from the tuitioning program is the feature of the amended statute, not a bug… And although the poison pill failed to stop the Supreme Court from deciding Carson, it now excludes religious schools that teach from a particular religious perspective and whose admissions requirements reflect their religious mission from participating in the tuition program. As a result, it perpetuates the religious discrimination at the heart of the sectarian exclusion.

That’s a long way of saying, “We have to reject gay and trans people—and deserve to get taxpayer dollars for it—because that’s the most important way of showing people how much we love Jesus.”

You’ll never see a lawsuit like this where Christian groups argue that they have to feed the hungry because their faith demands it. Even when they are fighting to provide shelter to unhoused people, these lawsuits are always about their ability to deny help or employment to LGBTQ people.

A similar appeal has also been made from another religious group:

Another lawsuit raising the same issues was brought on behalf of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland; a Roman Catholic-affiliated school, St. Dominic’s Academy in Auburn, Maine; and parents who want to use state tuition funds to send their children to St. Dominic’s. That case is also being appealed to the 1st Circuit.

We’ll see if the judges on the First Circuit buy their arguments. (It’s one of the only appellate courts with no Trump nominees on the bench.) But the bottom line here is that no one was ever stopping these churches or their affiliated schools from spreading hate. If that’s a core Christian belief to them, so be it. Let them shout their bigotry from the rooftops. Let the rest of us shine a spotlight on it.

Still, it’s absurd to whine about how the state is requiring participants in a statewide program to adhere to the state’s Human Rights Act. If the churches end up winning their cases, it’ll be because the conservative Supreme Court has made it clear religious groups can get away with anything they want, not because those faith-based institutions have any kind of ethical or moral upper hand.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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