A legal team from the Alliance Defending Freedom has submitted a filing to the Oklahoma Supreme Court opposing a state official’s insistence that the state discriminate against one charter school because it is Catholic.
They cite the determination from the U.S. Supreme, already a precedent, that religious organizations cannot arbitrarily be excluded from a generally available program “solely because of their religious character.”
The fight is ramping up in Okahoma, where Attorney General Gentner Drummond is demanding, through the courts, that St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School be excluded from the state’s charter program because of its faith-based character.
“The board’s decision was informed by the Free Exercise Clause, which prohibits state officials from denying public funding to religious schools simply because they are religious,” said lawyer Phil Sechler, of ADF.
“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more choices, not fewer. The U.S. Constitution and Oklahoma’s Religious Freedom Act both protect St. Isidore’s freedom to operate according to its faith and the board’s decision to approve such learning options for Oklahoma families.
“We urge the state’s high court to reject this legal challenge that discriminates against religion and affirm the constitutionally protected rights of religious groups to be treated the same as their secular counterparts.”
Drummond is insisting that the contract the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board entered with St. Isidore be cancelled.
The board on June 5 adopted a decision to approve the application from St. Isidore.
Then Drummond filed a lawsuit claiming the board was breaking the law.
Drummond, the ADF charged, “asks the court to cancel the contract …. solely because St. Isidore is Catholic. … Far from displaying religious tolerance, Petitioner also singles out ‘sects of the Muslim faith’ as groups who could establish charter schools with tenets ‘diametrically opposed by most Oklahomans,'” the filing states.
“Petitioner grievously misunderstands religion liberty,” the brief explains.
“To be sure, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act requires charter schools to be ‘nonsectarian’ in their ‘operations’ and prohibits them from ‘affiliating with a … religious institution.’ But the board members took an oath to ‘obey … the Constitution of the United States.’ And that oath prompted their decision not to discriminate against St. Isidore based on religion.”
The briefing explained, “Protecting religious liberty requires placing religious organizations on equal footing with their secular counterparts and not treating religious organizations with hostility. [Drummond] would have the board violated both…”
IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Shortly after Hamas terrorists fired over 5,000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and then proceeded to attack the Jewish state by land, sea and air – torturing, burning, beheading and murdering well over a thousand people, including women, children and infants, and wounding and abducting hundreds more – world reaction was, in its own way, almost equally shocking.
For after the biggest one-day mass slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, what followed was an outpouring of celebratory demonstrations, unbridled Jew-hatred, deliriously gleeful support for Hamas and bitter condemnation of the nation of Israel. Not just in the Arab-Muslim world, but throughout the Western world as well, including all across America.
Why? What is behind the explosion of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, pro-terror sentiment in the United States, where Israel has long been one of America’s closest friends and allies? Why are hordes of young “woke” LGBT demonstrators marching in support of Hamas – when Hamas wouldn’t think twice about binding and blindfolding them and throwing them off the roof of a tall building – as they routinely do in the Muslim world?
It turns out there’s one area of agreement that is so powerful, deep-seated and all-consuming that the vast differences between the deranged left and the murderous jihadists melt away into Kumbaya harmony.
All of this and much more is completely exposed in November’s issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled ISRAEL VS. GLOBAL JIHAD: How Jew-hatred, radical Islam and Leftism are pushing us toward World War III. Beyond a deeply insightful dive into why leftists are surging toward radical Islam – which hates and dreams of raping and butchering them – this Whistleblower issue includes fantastic articles by everyone from top Israeli analyst (and former Israel Defense Forces officer) Caroline Glick to Harvest Christian Fellowship’s Pastor Greg Laurie on the current war in Israel and biblical prophecies regarding the End Times … which he says are now upon us.
WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.
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