Texas Happy To Send Taxpayer Money To Religious Schools, Just Not Yours.

[erronis]

https://www.wonkette.com/p/texas-happy-to-send-taxpayer-money
Doktor Zoom

They're blocking Muslim schools, in case that wasn't obvious.

Texas is supposedly in the process of rolling out its new "school choice" program, the Texas Education Freedom Account (TEFA), to fund private schools with taxpayer money. Many of the schools in the program are Christian, because who cares about the First Amendment anymore? In fact, dozens of schools in the program openly discriminate against non-Christians and LGBTQ folks, because God tells them to. (Bigotry is protected by the First Amendment, after all, and the only real discrimination would be not sending taxpayer funds to bigoted church schools.)

But there's a catch, because while the state is happy to defund public schools by diverting tax dollars to religious schools, the state comptroller's office wants to ban some schools from the program. The pretext is that some of the schools allegedly have "connections" to the government of China, or in the case of some Islamic schools, because they're supposedly "connected" to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim civil rights group that Gov. Greg Abbott declared in November is a "terrorist" group. CAIR is suing over the designation, but hey, a pretext's a pretext!

As as result, hundreds of schools have been shut out of the voucher program just before applications from parents are supposed to go live -- at least for the time being. That's despite the fact that there are only a couple dozen Islamic private schools in the state, which has already scared some Christian nationalists so much that they opposed the voucher program in the first place, warning that it would fund scary Muslim schools.

So why the holdup for hundreds of schools? As the Houston Chronicle reports (gift link), the comptroller's request for clarification on banning them from the voucher program has held up approval for nearly every private school accredited by Cognia, the biggest private school accreditor in Texas. As a result, by Tuesday, "only 30 of the 600 schools accredited solely by the nonprofit were added to the list of approved vendors, most of them offering only pre-K and kindergarten."

. . .

[tanyev]

1. I wonder how many parents that send kids to non-Christian private schools supported school vouchers?

Like Muslims for Trump and Latinos for Trump, they never think that the fascists they’re supporting will turn on them.

😒