The editorial board of the South Florida Sun Sentinel points out that there’s considerable hypocrisy when it comes to religious liberty and public tax dollars for private schools.
Some politicians in Tallahassee act shocked — shocked! — that Islamic schools, 22 by one count, are taking advantage of Florida’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program.
Opponents have warned repeatedly that taxpayer-funded vouchers should not support religious education. But if they did, all faiths would be entitled without discrimination. Look who’s shocked now.
“The use of taxpayer-funded school vouchers to promote Sharia law likely contravenes Florida law and undermines our national security,” Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote on X.
“Schools that indoctrinate Sharia law should not be a part of our taxpayer-funded school voucher program,” posted Agriculture Commissioner Wilson Simpson.
Simpson, a former Senate president, tirelessly promoted vouchers, which have exploded into a $3 billion program. So did Uthmeier, a former top aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis. The third Cabinet member, Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, threatened to audit the Islamic schools.
None of them offered evidence that the schools are teaching Sharia law. But if they are, so what? They have every right to teach the fundamental law of their faith, just as Catholic schools teach catechism and yeshivas expound on the Torah and Talmud.
Sharia law is Islam’s elaborate code of conduct governing all aspects of life, including marriage and divorce. It is no conceivable threat to U.S. security. It’s nobody else’s business so long as it doesn’t find its way into secular statute books.
Having been eager to lavish taxpayer money on religious education and having excused how some Christian schools discriminate, it’s hypocrisy for any Florida politician to bloviate about what the Islamic schools may be teaching.
“They’ve got to take all comers — the ones they like and the ones they don’t,” says J. Brent Walker, a Florida-educated lawyer and clergyman and executive director emeritus of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “Of course they should be able to teach Sharia, and practice it, too! And maybe even if it violates Florida law, unless there is a compelling state interest to justify saying no.”
Tallahassee has indulged sickening misuses of tax dollars by private schools.
As columnist Scott Maxwell wrote in The Orlando Sentinel, some schools bar gay students, have fired gay teachers and rejected children from same-sex parents. Some private schools have excluded autistic children and others with physical or developmental disabilities.
Taxpayer dollars only for certain religious beliefs. Read the full editorial here.