Judge: Money for Baptist school is wrong

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Lawmakers violated the state constitution by budgeting $12 million to create a pharmacy school and a scholarship at a private Southern Baptist university, a judge ruled Thursday.

A gay rights group sued to block the state appropriation shortly after the University of the Cumberlands ousted a student in April 2006 for being gay.

Plaintiffs had argued, among other things, that the student's dismissal was evidence that the school in Williamsburg would not guarantee equal protection.

The judge ruled the court did not have to decide on that issue. Instead, Franklin Circuit Court Special Judge Roger Crittenden ruled that state funding for the school's pharmacy building violated portions of the Kentucky Constitution that guarantee religious freedom and that public money for education should not be spent on any "church, sectarian or denominational school." None of the funds was given to the school.

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In the grand scheme, this is a mundane and pretty straightforward, but well worth noting, case of violating the US Constitution's first amendment "establishment clause." That is, even though Supreme Court case history makes government money going to religious universities permissible because such institutions do not usually require students to adhere to a particular religious point of view, this particular case, with a student expulsion for sexual orientation, changes up the equation: banning gay students most definitely constitutes imposing a religious point of view, and therefore government funding violates the first amendment's "wall of separation between church and state."

On the other hand, I have no idea why this Kentucky judge opted for ruling under the seemingly stronger state statute. Maybe he feared being reversed on appeal in the conservatively stacked federal courts.

Whatever. I wholeheartedly approve of the outcome.

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