It’s Time to Remove This Trace of Anti-Catholic Bigotry from Our Laws

B laine Amendments are bigoted laws that bar public funding for religious institutions, schools especially, and they are still on the books in many states. They trace their roots to the anti-Catholicism that swept the nation in the late 1800s. Facing an influx of Irish Catholic immigrants, politicians tried to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit direct aid from the government to Catholic parochial schools that were created as an alternative to the then-explicitly Protestant public schools.

That Blaine Amendment failed at the federal level. So many states took their own go at a “mini Blaine,” or a state-level version, to achieve the same aim. Thirty-seven states succeeded. Fast-forward more than 100 years later: The U.S. Supreme Court has examined many of these state amendments, holding that they discriminate against not only Catholic schools but all faith-based schools.

But Michigan still has a sneaky work-around. And now its constitutionality is pending before the Supreme Court.

Michigan’s Blaine Amendment, the result of a union-driven political mobilization, did not come into being until 1970. It was, you could say, a bit late to the anti-Catholic bigotry game. And perhaps as a result, its rank religious bigotry is hidden in the purported broadness of its language.

The act prohibits public funding, direct or indirect, from going to all nonpublic schools. It even bars tax exemptions for parents paying tuition at private schools. Sounds neutral enough.

But context matters. And the context of Michigan’s Blaine Amendment is that when it was passed, 98 percent of the nonpublic schools in Michigan were . . . Catholic. The Michigan supreme court recognized this sneaky subterfuge when the law was challenged. It stated that “with ninety-eight percent of the private school students being in church-related schools,” the state’s Blaine Amendment was nearly “total” in its “impact.” “As far as the voters were concerned in 1970, . . .” the court wrote, the Blaine Amendment was “an anti-parochial amendment — no public monies to run parochial schools — and beyond that all else was utter and complete confusion.”

Michigan’s Blaine Amendment was hardly neutral, and, more than 50 years later, the utter and complete confusion continues and cuts religious parents out of the taxpayer benefits afforded to secular parents in deciding how to best educate their children. It’s the worst kind of discrimination, in that it is cloaked in the language of impartiality.

But bigotry by any other name, it turns out, still reeks.

A group of parents, represented by the Mackinac Legal Center, has sued, and after losing before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, is now asking the Supreme Court to hear their case. The parents have school-age children and are seeking a tiny portion of the public-education funding riches, made all the richer by billions in covid funding for public schools, to pay for their kids’ private, religious-school education. They claim that Michigan’s 1970 Blaine Amendment disenfranchises them based on their religious views and that the amendment was adopted because of voter animus toward faith-based (read Catholic) educational institutions.

In addition to being hostile to religion, Michigan’s Blaine Amendment flies in the face of a nationwide trend toward school choice. Currently 29 states have state-funded programs that let parents control the direction of their child’s education — through vouchers, education savings accounts, tax credits, or a combination of all three. All share the common belief that one size does not fit all students when it comes to schooling. Many parochial schools boast enviable results on shoestring budgets and are a wonderful alternative to public schools for millions of families. They have had promising results for religious and nonreligious students alike.

Researcher David Figlio has shown, for example, that low-income Catholic-school students using the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship outperform their non-Catholic-school peers in both reading and math. Annual learning gains by these disadvantaged students show that the academic excellence, high expectations, and well-ordered and disciplined atmosphere at these schools are just what these students need to live up to their full potential. And, unlike Michigan’s Blaine Amendment, these schools don’t discriminate on the basis of religion. They accept students of all faiths or no faith and believe deeply — so much so that they often operate at a loss — that every child deserves to live up to his or her full academic potential.

Michigan students and their parents are being denied the chance to avail themselves of these educational opportunities because of their state’s slick but no less religiously offensive Blaine Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court should take up Hile v. State of Michigan and make sure that every Blaine Amendment, regardless of its rhetorical disguise, is rightfully ruled unconstitutional.

Ashley McGuire is a senior fellow with The Catholic Association and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female. Grazie Pozo Christie is a senior fellow with The Catholic Association. McGuire and Christie are co-hosts of the nationally syndicated radio show Conversations with Consequences.