Guest Post by Morbo
Last week I spotted a headline on Yahoo News that made me gasp: “Student Expelled for Gay Parents.”
“What morons,” I thought. “That school must want to get sued.” I assumed it was a public institution run by knuckle-draggers somewhere in the Bible Belt.
But I was wrong on both counts. Turns out the institution in question is a private Christian academy in Ontario, Calif. There goes the lawsuit.
Private religious schools have wide latitude to impose whatever standards they like on students, parents, faculty and staff. They can deny admission to students if their parents are the “wrong” religion, if they’re gay, if they are cohabitating or even if they just wear dorky pants. Same with staff. If you are a woman teaching in a private Christian school and you get pregnant out of wedlock, join a pro-choice march or get caught reading “The Origin of Species,” the clergy who run the place can hand you a pink slip. It’s their show, and they get to run it as they see fit.
I support that right. Religious institutions must be free to manage their own affairs. The First Amendment gives them that absolute right.
But this recent incident underscores why these schools must be made to keep their grubby mitts off the public treasury.
Because they discriminate like this, private religious schools should not be given access to so much as one dime from the public purse through vouchers or other means. If private schools want tax aid, let them meet every regulation and law imposed on public schools, including the non-discrimination provisions, then we’ll talk.
This issue is ripe for national debate. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush and his allies in Congress have been pushing a voucher plan aimed at students displaced by the storm. Are they going to be able to use their vouchers at school like this?
I feel for 14-year-old freshman Shay Clark and her parents, Tina Clark and Mitzi Gray. The officials at Ontario Christian High School are narrow-minded bigots who made the wrong call. But they had the right to make it.
Tina Clark told reporters that she and her partner, Lutherans who have been together 22 years, sought a religious education for Shay.
“I actually hoped she would learn as much as she could about the Christian faith and get a higher education. Those were the two focal points for me,” Clark said.
I have a feeling something good will come out of this. Shay Clark is now attending a public school. Her parents want her to go to college. Attending a public high school may actually make that more likely.
I’ve been to Ontario Christian High’s website. Here is what the school teaches about earth science:
“God’s handiwork is displayed in the earth’s organization. We will focus on the rocks and minerals that make up the crust of the earth, then the atmosphere that surrounds the earth and the water that covers so much of it….We will learn that what we view as catastrophic is really a natural recycling of our earth. Our students will seek to discover man’s place in God’s creation of this planet.”
Biology class is described thusly:
“Recognizing God as our creator is a focus throughout the year.”
The U.S. history course
“begins with a Christian view of history and a Christian view of creation.”
In other words, poor Shay was going to be taught creationism and pseudo-historical “Christian nation” claptrap. That might have helped her get into the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, but a real school would probably have looked at it askance.
In the long run, Ontario Christian’s bigotry has made her better off.
One more thought on this: If this school were engaging in some other type of bigotry, saying denying admission to non-white students, government officials would find some way to punish it — probably by yanking its tax exemption. I look forward to the day when discriminating against gay people results in the same form of retaliation.