Sometimes in high-profile religious-liberty lawsuits, there are legitimate competing interests on both sides. Other times, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that governments’ dominant motivation is anti-religious prejudice rather than a sincere concern for the public interest.
Typifying the latter case, California was at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today defending a state law that excludes Jewish schools from receiving special-education funding to help children with disabilities.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, passed by Congress in 1990, gives funding to individual states to provide special-education programs in public schools but allows that funding to be directed to private schools when public schools cannot meet the needs of a particular child. California, however, felt that it was of particular importance to exclude religious private schools from that eligibility. The consequence is that parents like Chaya and Yoni Loffman are forced to choose between providing fully for their disabled son’s special needs or giving him the religious education central to their Jewish faith. It’s a dichotomy that could easily disappear with minimal cost — one is tempted to say with absolutely no cost — to the public. Yet California is, for some reason, intent on making sure that the only children who don’t have access to educational resources to deal with special needs are religious ones.
Such blatant discrimination is anathema to our Constitution and spirit of religious pluralism. Luckily, organizations such as the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (disclosure: my former employer) are there to fight for the Loffmans, who note in RealClearPolicy this morning that “[it] would be a stretch to say that the entire Jewish future rests on the outcome of our lawsuit, but the Jewish future of our son just might.” The Ninth Circuit should make sure that California’s attempt to spoil the future of disabled religious children does not succeed.