Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond — a Republican — is bucking his own party in a new lawsuit aimed at preventing what would be the first publicly funded religious school in America from opening.
On Friday, Drummond filed the suit in Oklahoma Supreme Court, challenging the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s 3-2 decision in June to grant a contract to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School. According to PBS, Drummond warned that the establishment of St. Isidore, which is sponsored by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, would lead to the floodgates opening for religious groups of all stripes to make bids for public funding for schools of their own.
“Make no mistake, if the Catholic Church were permitted to have a public virtual charter school, a reckoning will follow in which this state will be faced with the unprecedented quandary of processing requests to directly fund all petitioning sectarian groups,” the lawsuit read.
While he could have said it differently and with a lot more cultural sensitivity, he’s correct.
If you allow religion in our schools, you are opening up Pandora box. Flying spaghetti monster deserves a space too.
For sure. It just amuses me that someone can find the shittiest possible ways to argue for the right outcome, and that the media can just overlook the shitty parts because they (rightly) agree with that outcome.
I think it’s also worth noting the phrasing is very deliberate - he reportedly has political aspirations and existing beef with the Senator, so he’s appealing to his potential base too. He mentions Sharia later at least once more and makes sure to let people know he thinks kids should be reading Bibles with their family. It’s all filthy and deliberate politics, and it’s clearly the right thing to do, bizarrely twisted into… this.
This is the definition of “the ends justify the means.”
Yeah, there’s a lot of Macchievalianism in politics. It’s not my favourite thing that humans do.