by Rusty Pugh and Jody Brown
A conservative women’s advocacy group says hardworking, taxpaying parents should have the right to send their children to any school they wish — and the fact that it may be a religious school should not have any bearing.
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a challenge to the Cleveland, Ohio, school voucher program which allows parents to receive tax credit in the form of vouchers, so that they may choose where they send their children to school. Many parents choose religious schools, and that is where opposition to the program is rooted.
Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women for America, says the bottom line is that every American child deserves to have a quality education, and that should include schools that emphasize Christian values.
“This is a case where parents are able to take money from the tax system, and remember that religious, Christian, whatever people do pay taxes, which goes to support schools,” Rios says. “This is a case where their tax money is given back to them in the form of a voucher, and then they may make a choice to send their children to a private school that may, in fact, indeed be religious.”
The pro-family activist says it is hard to understand why anyone would object to a parent choosing a religious school for their own child.
“American education, of course, was started out to make sure that every child had a good education,” she says. “The intention of the early founding fathers was never that that education was minus any religious values. In fact, in the early schools, Bible reading was right there. And I would like to point out to people who are so concerned about this that no one was held at gunpoint and forced to be Christian.”
Rios says opposition is coming from the big education bureaucracy, led by the teachers' unions, who see the exodus from public schools as a threat to the status quo.
But columnist R. Cort Kirkwood, writing for AgapePress, does not think tuition vouchers are such a good idea. He says they simply “round trip” money between parents and the government that should not have been taken in the first place. He says if parents want school choice, they should press elected officials for federal and state income tax credits that do not exceed the income tax liability. He adds that such credits would prevent the problem of “subsidizing” religion. See his article at AgapePress here.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
