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Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays

Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012

Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.

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Supreme Court Rules Maine Must Include Religious Schools in Tuition Program

State’s program provides tuition for students in remote areas to attend private nonsectarian schools, but not religious ones 

Olivia Carson with her mother, Amy Carson, in front of Maine’s Bangor Christian Schools in 2018.PHOTO: GABOR DEGRE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Jess Bravin

Updated June 21, 2022 3:20 pm ET

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WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that religious schools can’t be excluded from a Maine program that pays private-school tuition for students in areas that lack public schools, the latest decision by a conservative majority skeptical of precedents that drew a bright line between church and state.

“Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Read the Supreme Court Decision: Carson v. Makin

Three liberal justices dissented, arguing that the Constitution doesn’t compel a state to support religious education simply because it also supports private secular schools.

“This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent. 

Some 5,000 of Maine’s 180,000 secondary-school students live in localities without public schools—many in the state’s sparsely populated north—and therefore qualify for the tuition program. Parents there could obtain tuition payments for any accredited “nonsectarian school,” in-state or out, that provides instruction “roughly equivalent to the education they would receive in public schools.”

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Maine argued in the case, Carson v. Makin, that including schools that taught “through the lens” of religious faith was contrary to the mission of public education. Chief Justice Roberts, citing recent precedents that barred states from excluding religious schools from public subsidies, said that concern was beside the point, because the tuition program doesn’t directly provide education.

“Today’s decision makes clear, once and for all, that the government may not bar parents from selecting religious schools within educational choice programs, whether because of their religious affiliation or the religious instruction they provide,” said Michael Bindas, an attorney with the advocacy group Institute for Justice who argued for the parents. “Parents have a constitutional right to choose such schools for their children.”

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said he was “terribly disappointed and disheartened” by the ruling.

“The education provided by the schools at issue here is inimical to a public education. They promote a single religion to the exclusion of all others, refuse to admit gay and transgender children, and openly discriminate in hiring teachers and staff,” he said. 

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Mr. Frey, a Democrat, said he intended to explore legislative options “to address the court’s decision and ensure that public money is not used to promote discrimination, intolerance and bigotry.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that Missouri couldn’t exclude church schoolsfrom a program offering grants for playground resurfacing. In 2020 it said Montana must let religious schools partake of a tuition tax-credit program for private education. Those precedents “suffice to resolve this case,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. 

While the state policy can’t favor sectarian education, the mechanism of the Maine program ensured that individual parents, rather than officials in Augusta, are responsible for directing the funds to religious schools, according to the opinion.

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“A neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend” the Constitution, the opinion said. 

Maine had alternatives if it wanted to avoid public subsidy of sectarian schools, Chief Justice Roberts wrote. The state “could expand the reach of its public school system, increase the availability of transportation, provide some combination of tutoring, remote learning, and partial attendance, or even operate boarding schools of its own,” he wrote.

The First Amendment forbids government from involvement in “an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer said the majority had privileged the second clause by largely ignoring the first.

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Read literally, Justice Breyer wrote, the “apparently absolutist nature” of the two guarantees puts them at odds. But they “express complementary values,” reflecting the framers’ wish to avoid the religious conflicts that so often visited Europe, he wrote, joined in whole or part by Justices Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

SUPREME COURT & RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

Read more related coverage, selected by the editors:

• What’s Ahead as Supreme Court Nears Session’s End
• Supreme Court Hears Arguments on State Funds for Religious Schools (Dec. 8, 2021)
• Supreme Court Strikes Down Montana Ban on State Aid to Church Schools (June 30, 2020)
• Supreme Court Says State Playground-Grant Program Can’t Exclude Religious Schools (June 26, 2017)

“This potential for religious strife is still with us,” he wrote, noting that more than 100 religions are practiced within the U.S. “With greater religious diversity comes greater risk of religiously based strife, conflict, and social division.”

The court’s ruling effectively requires taxpayers to subsidize religious instruction in church-run schools with “admissions policies that allow them to deny enrollment to students based on gender, gender-identity, sexual orientation, and religion,” Justice Breyer wrote. 

While the Maine program is small, the case could have implications for much larger school systems. A possible future question could be whether charter schools, which are publicly funded but managed with autonomy from the traditional school system, can include religious instruction.

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“I think we’re already at the point that states will be forced to let churches operate charter schools,” said Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. Future cases, he added, are likely to test “whether the churches must run their charters according to the rules of public schools or are free to run them as they would a private school.”

In the Maine case, parents David and Amy Carson challenged the exclusion of Bangor Christian Schools. “BCS believes that God has ordained distinct and separate spiritual functions for men and women, and the husband is to be the leader of the home and men are to be the leaders of the church,” court papers say. The school considers homosexuality immoral and its curriculum seeks, among other goals, to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion” and “determine a Christian framework for determining and executing foreign policy,” the papers say.

Another couple, Troy and Angela Nelson, wish to send their daughter to Temple Academy in Waterville. The school requires that parents “sign a Family Covenant” expressing “agreement with Temple Academy’s views on abortion, the sanctity of marriage, and homosexuality,” court papers say.

Both schools have said they wouldn’t accept state funding if required to alter their curriculum.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin+1@wsj.com