Court Blocks Religious Colleges in New Jersey From Receiving Grants
How is this happening and where is Governor Chris Christie?
Campus Reform reports.
New Jersey court blocks grants to religious colleges
A state appeals court ruled Thursday that New Jersey may not award state grants intended for building renovations to two religious colleges.
The proposal was initially challenged in 2013, when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against Gov. Chris Christie’s administration on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally promoting particular religious doctrines, and thus violating the state’s Establishment Clause, by awarding grants to an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva and a Presbyterian seminary.
Christie’s administration countered that the funds would only help pay for construction and renovations as part of a $1.3 billion funding package affecting 44 other New Jersey campuses, and would not directly subsidize religious teaching or worship at either institution.
But on Thursday, the court ruled in favor of the ACLU’s case, which officially overturns both a $10.6 million grant to Beth Medrash Govoha for a new library and academic center, as well as a $645,323 grant to Princeton Presbyterian Seminary for technology upgrades.
“This is a victory for civil rights and a victory for New Jersey taxpayers, who should never have to subsidize institutions that discriminate or that exist to teach their particular religious doctrine,” Ed Barocas, legal director for the ACLU, told NJ.com.
Barocas explained that while “everyone has a fundamental constitutional right to worship freely,” taxpayers have an equal right to know that “their money will never be responsible for propping up particular sects’ religious ministries.”
Comments
Now lets remember that if it was a Mosque, not a Orthodox Jewish yeshiva and a Presbyterian seminary, The ACLU would not so much as glace at it and even throw some of their money to help.
You did not use the politically correct term,
it is Islamic Cultural Center.
The amendment as adopted in 1791 reads as follows:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It seems to me that there are 1) a basic literacy problem, and 2) a basic philosophical problem.
1) A simple reading of the first part of the first clause indicates that the US congress should neither make a law for, nor a law against, an establishment of religion. This was meant to apply to the federal government only. Plenty of states had laws establishing religions.
2) The idea that government can be “religiously neutral” is a particularly foolish and self-serving myth propagated by atheists. All systems of law necessarily involve visions of “the good”, which are subject to opinion and function as religious commitments. So, especially, do education systems, such as the New Jersey schools other than the two to which this foolish court denied state funding.