Attorney Seeks Equality for Maine's Voucher Program Parents
by Jim Brown
October 13, 2004
(AgapePress) - The Maine Supreme Court is being asked to stop barring religious schools from the state's tuition program.A federal judge recently backed a state law that prohibits parents from using school tuition vouchers to send their kids to private religious schools. The Institute for Justice, the premier libertarian public-interest law firm in the U.S., is appealing that ruling to the Maine Supreme Court on behalf of eight families.
Institute attorney Dick Komer points out that the decision differs from a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of an Ohio city's school voucher program in the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. In that case the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Cleveland, Ohio's school voucher program does not violate the so-called separation of Church and State.
"The decision in Zelman, the Cleveland case, said that the legislature is permitted to include the option of choosing religious schools -- permitted -- and that the establishment clause allows that," Komer explains. "And in Cleveland," he continues, "the Ohio legislature had included the religious schools. In Maine the religious schools were originally included but had been excluded pursuant to an Attorney General opinion in 1981."
Komer says he is attempting to turn the clock back to 1980, when Maine parents were allowed to select religious options. He is urging the state's highest court to reverse what he calls the "faulty" free exercise and establishment clause holdings the court made while upholding the law in 1999. However, the Institute for Justice attorney is not optimistic the appeal will be successful.
"It's one thing to use the federal religion clauses as a shield to protect the participation of religious schools where the legislature has included them," Komer says. "It's a very different thing to try and use the religion clauses and the Equal Protection clause as a sword to try and require legislatures or states to include religious options."
