Wow, Rieux that rant was remarkably unreponsive and irrelevant to what ddave and I argued.

Then it appears you need to look up the words “unresponsive” and “irrelevant” in the dictionary.

I specifically pointed out that the vouchers-cleanse-everything argument you posted would allow the federal government to transfer every single government service into discriminatory church hands. And it would. (States, too.) Your argument licenses total theocracy.

I also pointed out that you entirely ignored the Supreme Court precedent–you know, the material that establishes what is and is not the official interpretation of the U.S. Constitution–Jesse cited. It’s your airy “I don’t see a valid argument for unconstitutionality,” with no attention whatsoever paid to the precedent analyzed in the original post, that’s unresponsive.

Finally, I pointed out how ugly it is to see (a) self-declared atheist(s) supporting voucher systems that enable flat-out unquestioned rule by churches. You may not like the direct implications of your Constitutional argument, but that hardly makes those implications “unresponsive” or “irrelevant,” of all things.

Stop supporting theocracy.

And of course, as someone has pointed out, just because the average tuition is more like $15,000 doesn’t mean that there aren’t schools that are lower cost. Then again, $7500 really isn’t that much for a private school, and it sounds like the families these grants are going to aren’t intended to be the families who could easily top up the voucher with a couple thousand dollars extra to attend a below average costing secular school at say $10,000.

In terms of effectiveness – I saw people citing the performance of the students vs. the general population as being a lot better, but what you really need to do is look at the students in the program vs. the students who applied for the program but didn’t get selected (ideally if selection was done via a lottery). From what I’ve seen, having parents who care enough to seek out these sort of “school choice” opportunities is far more influential on performance than the choice itself.

If the government can ship unlimited tax dollars to religious bodies merely by creating a legal fiction called a “voucher,” there is no boundary whatsoever to a total theocracy. The federal government can simply outsource all services to churches, who can then be as discriminatory, evangelistic, or generally disgusting toward religious minorities as they’d like, in their administration of Social Security, Medicare, the lower federal courts, the IRS, and all of the other operations of the federal government. And you guys have declared that there can be no constitutional problem with that, because oooh, vouchers! (Thankfully, the Supreme Court, though it is anything but consistent in taking religious minorities’ rights seriously, is not nearly as far gone as you two–as the original post explained, and you ignored.)

The Bill of Rights is intended to protect minorities, not to encourage powerful majorities to concoct silly shell games so that they’re allowed to trample on us.

Atheists supporting voucher programs designed to ship tax money to religious schools are a lot like GLBT folks campaigning for Fred Phelps for President. Please look before you leap–and throw us all into a real “Christian Nation” that your Constitutional interpretation leads directly into.

ckitching, government contractors are people hired by the government to perform specific tasks. We don’t all become government contractors simply by participating in government programs or accepting government funds.

Public education run at the federal level is unconstitutional, period.

llewelly:

Citation, please?

I can provide a citation against that claim:

The Congress shall have Power To . . . exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District. . .[as may] become the Seat of the Government of the United States. . . (U.S constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 17, emphasis added)

That being said, the DC public school system is an absolute cesspool. There is terrible violence and the educational results are abysmal. I’m an atheist, but if we can save money and some kids can get a real education, let them pick their schools, public or private.

Public education run at the federal level is unconstitutional, period.

Citation, please?