There’s nothing new about Republican-controlled states funneling money to religious schools that refuse to admit LGBTQ+ kids. Even so, Arkansas has taken it to what seems to be a new level.
The Arkansas Department of Education promoted a video on a specific Christian school’s participation in the state’s new voucher program. This was not a video on the voucher program as a whole that happened to mention a Christian school. It was two minutes and 30 seconds of an administrator and families at the school talking about it. Dave Ramsey of the Arkansas Times reported that Cornerstone Christian Academy, where a voucher will cover an entire year’s tuition, has 64 voucher students out of 150 total.
“Each child is different, each child is unique, and we believe they are designed uniquely perfect,” an administrator said in the video. Except if they’re LGBTQ+, apparently. Ramsey followed up with a report confirming that Cornerstone Christian Academy’s policy is:
The significance the Bible places on the severity of sexual immorality, and our commitment to a “Christ-centered” environment demands certain standards for admittance to CCA. Therefore, students will NOT be permitted to attend CCA who professes any sort of sexually immoral lifestyle or an openly sinful lifestyle including but not limited to: promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc.
Again, lots of Christian schools have this kind of policy. Lots of them get public money through school vouchers. It happens in Wisconsin, Florida, Indiana, and Arizona. And it should be a scandal that this happens so regularly. But when Maryland tried to ban such a school from getting state education money through vouchers, a federal judge said that was a violation of religious freedom.
Arkansas went a step beyond just using state education money on a school that bans kids with “an openly sinful lifestyle including but not limited to: promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc.”
“It’s become all too common to see state departments of education taken over by political appointees more interested in using their perch to build out private vouchers — which overwhelmingly fund kids already in private school — than in serving public school children,” Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, told the Arkansas Times. “But usually they pretend it’s about parental choice more broadly. What’s less common — what I’ve yet to see, in fact — is a state agency leaning this heavily into promotion of private education. And Christian education at that.”
This is the future Republicans want to see: public schools being defunded while families that could already afford private school get their tuition paid at schools that tell LGBTQ+ kids there’s something terribly wrong with them.
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