The Oklahoma Supreme Court ordered the state Department of Education to rescind its contract with the group behind St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, intended to be the first publicly-funded parochial charter school in the country, CNN reports., saying the state funding a religious school clearly violates the Constitutions of both the state and the United States.
“Under Oklahoma law, a charter school is a public school,” Justice James R. Winchester wrote in the court’s 6-2 majority opinion. “As such, a charter school must be nonsectarian. However, St. Isidore will evangelize the Catholic faith as part of its school curriculum while sponsored by the State.”
The lawsuit is another example of the chaos in the GOP: Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, filed the lawsuit that led to the revocation of the contract, which had been praised by Republican Governor Kevin Stitt. “The framers of the US Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution clearly understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the State from sponsoring any religion at all,” Drummond said in a statement following the order. “Now Oklahomans can be assured that our tax dollars will not fund the teachings of Sharia Law or even Satanism.”