The LGBTQ+ is supposed to be a protected class, but we've allowed loop holes, and the Christian Right is great at using them. We really need to pay more attention. I don't want my money funding this kind of discrimination. Vote people!!
In Florida, a 2020 Sentinel investigation found that the state’s school scholarship program funneled more than $129 million in public money to at least 156 private Christian schools that refused admission to students who identified as LGBTQ or came from families in which a parent or another family member did. About 14% of the state’s nearly 47,000 scholarship students who used public money to attend private schools put it towards institutions that banned homosexuality.https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-01/when-private-schools-take-public-money-but-still-discriminate?embedded-checkout=true
religious schools’ treatment of LGBTQ students to their previous legal attempts to remain racially segregated. “Until the 1980s you saw private K-12 schools and even colleges and universities saying, ‘We don’t want to admit Black students based on our sincerely held religious beliefs.’” Then in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled the IRS was allowed to revoke the tax exempt status of Bob Jones University because it condemned interracial dating and marriage.
“The Court found that civil rights trump religious beliefs,” says Eckes. “We’re seeing this play out again,” she says, only this time, the question is about sex.
A 2020 Supreme Court ruling
found that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers LGBTQ people, at least at work. But with schools, the court hasn't been as clear. In June, it
ruled that the state of Maine had to include evangelical schools in its public voucher program even though one school
required teachers it hired to acknowledge that homosexuals were “perverted.” Another, meanwhile, taught students that men were the God-ordained head of the household.
Eckes says the Court focused on freedom of religion rather than students’ civil rights. She says it would take another lawsuit specifically about the rights of LGBTQ students to determine if they have the same protections as LGBTQ workers.
Until that happens, religious schools will be free to expel LGBTQ students — or even straight ones raised by same-sex parents — and still receive public funds. In other words, school choice is not available to everyone.