The Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association<\/a>, whose stated mission includes \u201cprotecting people,\u201d has filed a court brief opposing him.<\/p>\nUthmeier is the same attorney general who threatens to have the governor remove Orlando-area State Attorney Monique Worrell, a Democrat, for not prosecuting cases his way.<\/p>\n
Cracks in church-state wall<\/p>\n
In his latest I-am-the-law crusade, Uthmeier is repudiating one of the most fundamental aspects of our democracy, the separation of church and state.<\/p>\n
He issued an opinion saying it\u2019s unconstitutional for Florida to deny college scholarships for study at religious institutions so long as it makes them available at nonsectarian schools. No court case is challenging that, so Uthmeier\u2019s opinion invites one.<\/p>\n
This opinion is a direct attack on Florida\u2019s constitutional provision against spending public money \u201cdirectly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.\u201d It\u2019s an endorsement of state-funded religious schools.<\/p>\n
The Legislature has circumvented the ban by making K-12 vouchers available to students instead of funding private schools directly.<\/p>\n
Uthmeier cites U.S. Supreme Court precedents saying states can\u2019t discriminate against religious schools in certain ways. But he would take that much further by legalizing direct aid to religious charter schools (there are none now).<\/p>\n
So he\u2019s inviting someone to start one and promising in effect to help them overturn the state law that requires charter schools to be nonsectarian.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s well beyond the Supreme Court\u2019s expansionist view of the free exercise clause in the First Amendment. He\u2019s attacking the other relevant First Amendment language, the establishment clause, which forbids the government from sponsoring any religion.<\/p>\n
Legalistic extremism<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the difference: The government can help pay to rebuild a church damaged by a hurricane on the same basis as it would subsidize any other recovery. But it can\u2019t build a church or pay the pastor\u2019s salary.<\/p>\n
Charter schools are public schools in every major respect other than how they\u2019re governed and in what rules they have to obey.<\/p>\n
Taking Uthmeier\u2019s extremist opinion to its logical conclusion, Fort Lauderdale High parents could convert it to a fundamentalist Christian school favoring creationism or male supremacy, and no one could do anything about it. His opinion is\u00a0a full-throated screed for Christian nationalism.<\/p>\n
He argues that the First Amendment \u201cdid not displace Christianity as the center of the nation\u2019s religious identity\u201d \u2014 a complete red herring.<\/p>\n
The proper question is the role of religion in government, not in society.<\/p>\n
The First Amendment requires government to be neutral on matters of religion, neither endorsing nor opposing.<\/p>\n
Upending a delicate balance<\/p>\n
Our original Constitution refers to religion only in forbidding any religious test to hold public office. A 1796 treaty with Tripoli declared that the U.S. government \u201cis not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in Uthmeier\u2019s view, \u201cproperly understood, the Religion Clauses work together to ensure people can live out their religious obligations to God.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, the religion clauses work against each other. It\u2019s this delicate balance that he\u2019s trying to destroy.<\/p>\n
An attorney general who cannot conscientiously defend a law owes his clients \u2014 the people of Florida \u2014 the duty of allowing a surrogate to do it.<\/p>\n
If not, the people of Florida need a new attorney general.<\/p>\n
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Executive Editor Roger Simmons, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant, Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It used to be the Florida Supreme Court\u2019s job to decide whether a law is unconstitutional. But the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[2853,482,139,141,140,109,76410],"class_list":["post-227449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-editorials","tag-opinion","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-social","tag-social-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}