For an excellent overview of Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, read this Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Although the case centers on the issue of taxpayer standing, I am pleased that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion and Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion mentions James Madison’s famous “Memorial and Remonstrance.” As Kagan points out, Madison “criticized a tax levy proposed in Virginia to aid teachers of the Christian religion.” In practice, however, taxpayers in a number of states indirectly subsidized religious education. Throughout the early nineteenth century, legislators directed money from Virginia’s literary fund to aid students, mostly paupers, who would receive religious instruction at academies, grammar schools, and colleges. In the North, Horace Mann successfully lobbied to have the taxpayers of Massachusetts fund an unabashedly pan-Protestant education.
I suppose this is a good time to plug the North Carolina History Project.
