Don Feder
School-choice is a religious freedom issue
ON APRIL 29, the House is scheduled to debate a bill to provide 2,000 low-income
scholarships in the District of Columbia. These stipends could be used to pay the tuition
at private nonsectarian or religious schools. A similar measure passed the Senate last
year.
The debate will focus on the fact that in a system of sinking standards, urban schools
are the absolute dregs.
But there is another equally compelling consideration -- giving parents the ability to
educate their children in schools that teach 
virtue would do much to advance the cause
of religious freedom.
During his trip to Cuba, Pope John Paul II touched on this matter, when he declared
that families "should be able to choose for their children the pedagogical method, the
ethical and civic content and the religious inspiration which will
enable them to receive an integral education."
Fidel Castro, who saw the Church as a threat to his hegemony, closed the nation's
Catholic schools in the early 1960s. The liberal elite that controls American public
education is as adverse to choice as the dictator who rules Cuba.
In America, religious liberty is based on the self-evident principle that families have a
right to impart spiritual values to their children.
No one would deny that parents have a right to take their children to religious services,
to celebrate religious holidays and to read the Bible in their homes. But the amount of
time the average family devotes to this is minimal compared to the 35 hours a week
that the public schools have their children as a captive audience.
Now, much of the school day is taken up with indoctrination in the creed of Rodham
nation -- sex education, multiculturalism, ecology studies and gay sensitivity. Students
are programmed in a worldview diametrically opposed to Judeo-Christian tradition.
One reason prayer was taken out of the schools in the early 1960s was to avoid a
glaring contradiction -- children praying to the one God at the beginning of the school
day and taught to worship other gods for the rest of the day.
Choice -- in the form of vouchers, scholarships or tax credits -- would give families the
means to resist the onslaught of education theorists, activists and teachers union
officials who dominate public schooling. That's why liberals resist the reform so fiercely.
On March 4, the House Judiciary Committee approved the Religious Liberty
Amendment to the United States Constitution, providing equal treatment for religious
and secular groups in the public arena.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the committee's ranking Democrat, warned, "The
real import," of the amendment, "is to force the government to fund religious
organizations in the same way it funds secular activities," with an ultimate goal of
supporting school vouchers.
In a attack on vouchers, Education Secretary Richard Riley noted, "Religious schools
now make up 79 percent of private schools." Thus, the secretary cautioned, choice
would lead to public support of religious education.
Liberals won't physically stop parents from sending their children to religious schools
(just yet). They will let you enroll your child in such an institution, but they'll make sure
you pay twice -- once for the public schools (through your property taxes or other
levies) and a second time in tuition at the local Sacred Heart Academy or Maimonides
day school.
Even though each child removed from public schools saves the system roughly $7,000
annually, they won't allow the middle class a tax rebate for private education or provide
vouchers for the poor.
This isn't government subsidizing religion, but facilitating freedom. Most of us are
squeezed dry to support state schools. Tax relief for parochial-school tuition should not
be equated with a handout.
Like Fidel Castro, liberals don't want competition for the minds and hearts of the young.
Lee Berg of the National Education Association is frank: "When education is not public,
we (the public education lobby) no longer have the ability to control what is taught."
Liberals believe that they alone should be able shape the future, that only their views
should be presented in America's classrooms. They want students instructed in the
commandments of Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, and the Gay, Lesbian and
Straight Education Network, not the Decalogue of Sinai.
The ability of families to choose religious education lies at the very heart of the school
choice debate, as it commands center stage in the struggle for religious
liberty.
Mona Charen