The Catholic Church Has Taken “Do Unto Others” in the Wrong Direction

School Religious preschools in Colorado are taking their plea to discriminate against LGBTQ+ parents all the way to the Supreme Court. Jonathan Kirn/The Image Bank Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Starting Tuesday, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in an education case that could upend the relationship between religion and school. Two Catholic preschools in Littleton, Colorado, want to receive state taxpayer funds earmarked for preschool education. But there’s one problem: Colorado says participating schools must be open to all, and the schools in St. Mary Catholic Parish insist on keeping out children with LGBTQ+ parents. The ramifications of SCOTUS’s decision could be huge. Instead of insisting that public institutions follow antidiscrimination laws, this case could put priority on religious groups’ “freedom” to discriminate. The irony might be funny if it were not so cruel. Catholic institutions have faced real, brutal discrimination in the United States. Throughout the 19th century, Catholic schools were subject to repeated violent attacks. In 1834, a mob burned a convent in Boston. Ten years later, the streets of Philadelphia exploded with Protestant militia attacks on their Catholic neighbors. The militias set fire to Catholic homes and churches and ultimately led to the deaths of at least a dozen people. In the 20th century, in addition to their brutal racism and antisemitism, the infamous bigots of the Ku Klux Klan also targeted Catholics. From their seats on local school boards across the country, Klan members fired Catholic teachers and banned Catholic schools. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was disturbingly mainstream. The organization was so popular that neither major political party had the courage to denounce it outright. A central part of the Klan’s politics of grievance was that white Protestants like themselves had been kicked out of what they viewed as their proper role as controllers of the nation’s public schools. As Klan leader and “Imperial Wizard” Hiram Evans wrote in the pages of the popular magazine the North American Review in 1926, the United States had suffered a “moral breakdown” forced by “the invasion of aliens and alien ideas.” In the Klan’s twisted logic, the Catholic Church represented the scheming “hierarchy” behind those “alien ideas.” Due to the influence of Catholicism, Evans warned, America’s natural leaders—white Protestants like himself and his followers—had lost their influence in American public schools; they had lost their “right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths.” The charges seem ludicrous, but they were politically potent at the time. As one Klan newspaper claimed in 1923, Catholic leaders had mounted a sinister attack on Americanism itself via the public schools—Catholics planned to teach the new generation of innocent American children about the “right of the Pope to govern” worldwide. The Minnesota Klan insisted that Catholic teachers would subvert public schools by instilling “un-American or foreign” ideas instead of “patriotism and love of country.” In response, the Klan mounted an all-out, nationwide attack on Catholic influence in education. In cities such as Anaheim, California; El Paso, Texas; and Indianapolis, they ran slates of school-board candidates who had secretly pledged to enact the Klan’s educational vision. Once in power, they fired Catholic teachers wholesale. In El Paso, for example, a Klan-run school board refused to renew the contracts of three Catholic school principals, fired seven Catholic elementary-school teachers, and reduced the salaries of four Catholic high-school teachers. The peak of the Klan’s anti-Catholic school campaign came from Oregon, where voters approved a sweeping new law that actually banned Catholic schools from the state. It was a popular measure among Klan backers, and similar bills were in the works in Alabama, Oklahoma, Washington, Michigan, Indiana, Texas, California, and Arkansas. In Oregon, the Klan justifiably claimed credit for the law’s passage. They distributed anti-Catholic literature to every single house in the state, including one strange 1922 publication, “The Old Cedar School.” In that pamphlet, a heroic Klan nightrider is portrayed racing to the rescue of the state’s public schools, which had been burned down by a sinister Catholic bishop. The leaders of Oregon’s Catholic schools objected, and they took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Back then, the Supreme Court rejected the Klan’s bigoted attack on Catholic education. The 1925 decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters didn’t take away the Klan’s ability to seize power on local school boards, but it did confirm that the Klan could not simply ban Catholic schools entirely. It struck a blow against discrimination in education. Today’s SCOTUS might go in a different direction. The backers of the Catholic preschools in Colorado insist that they are only fighting for religious freedom. Given the record of today’s conservative court majority, there’s a chance they’ll get their way. In 2022, after all, that majority decided in Carson v. Makin that a state could not exclude a religious school from any tax-funded program based only on its discriminatory religious beliefs. Today’s conservatives hope to build on that 2022 SCOTUS victory. They hope to shatter the protections of 1990’s Employment Division v. Smith. In that case, the court decided that a state could pass laws that were within its reasonable sphere of influence, even if those laws impinged on the religious freedom of some people. Supporters for the plaintiffs are hoping that today’s stridently conservative court majority will see things differently. In this case, they want to prove that a Catholic school has the right to follow its religious beliefs, no matter what the state or federal law says. That’s one step closer to enshrining the right for conservative Christians to ignore any law that goes against their beliefs. But those religious beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum. Religious freedom, in this case, means the freedom to target LGBTQ+ families, to exclude them from a publicly funded educational program. Moreover, the Catholic preschools in this case not only want the freedom to discriminate, but they insist that public money should pay for it. They want the entire public—including the LGBTQ+ families they’d be keeping out—to subsidize their discriminatory religious beliefs. The supposed right of Catholic schools to ban LGBTQ+ families is exactly the same right claimed by the Ku Klux Klan 100 years ago. Then and now, the bigots involved weren’t just trying to protect their right to practice their religion in isolation. No, they are insisting on their right to use the power of public funding to force their beliefs on other people. Imperial Wizard Evans would be proud. Education History Religion Supreme Court Catholic Church