After spending most of the morning being deluged with tweets by an angry anti-choice man letting me know that birth control is wrong and unnatural (as he typed his words into a computer in a climate controlled room), I see that the Supreme Court has ruled that school vouchers, that is public tax dollars for tuition, are legal in Arizona (and presumably everywhere else) even if they are for religious schools.
On paper, the lawsuit dealt only with a small-scale version of vouchers, one enacted in 2011 for students with special needs.
But the decision effectively ratifies the decision of lawmakers to expand eligibility to any student enrolled in a school rated D or F.
Potentially more significant, it removes any legal hurdle from a legislative effort this year to remove virtually all limits on who can get a voucher. A bill to do just that is awaiting a House vote.
The vast majority of K-12 students attend their local public schools. Most parents are not interested in vouchers because they are useless to them, as they do not typically come close to covering the entire costs of most private schools. Right wing interests groups want vouchers so that conservative parents can siphon money from taxpayers and use it to inculcate their own children. Of course, the long goal is to dismantle public education and force all students into religious schools or no school at all for them, but this is where it starts.
Which is funny to me because I’m constantly told by right wingers that contraception and abortion should not be covered by insurance or public health plans – despite the fact that women pay insurance premiums and taxes too – because that’s “paying for your sex life”. Well, are not children the result of sex in the vast majority of cases? Why are conservative parents expecting me to subsidize their sex lives? Let’s be consistent now. If you can’t afford to educate your children privately without a substantial amount of public money, then perhaps you should put an aspirin between your knees!
It’s really hard to live here.