The Moment I Knew This Would Go Sideways
Two years ago, I was sitting in a parent meeting at my kids' Christian school when our principal said something I've thought about almost every week since: "The moment the government funds us, they own us." She wasn't being dramatic. She'd watched it happen to other schools. Federal money comes with federal strings, and eventually the strings become a leash.
That warning cuts both ways. And Texas and Florida are about to learn that the hard way.
Both states are now facing legal and political pushback for attempting to exclude Islamic schools from their school voucher programs. The efforts vary in their mechanics—some involve explicit religious carve-outs, some involve vague national security language—but the intent is the same: keep Muslim schools out of the school choice ecosystem. And however you feel about Islam, this is a catastrophic mistake. Not just legally. Philosophically.
You Cannot Selectively Apply Religious Liberty
The entire intellectual architecture of the school choice movement rests on a single premise: parents, not bureaucrats, should decide where their children are educated. That premise doesn't have a religious qualifier. It doesn't say "parents of the right religion" or "parents whose faith passes a political litmus test." It says parents.
The moment you carve Islamic schools out of a voucher program, you've conceded that the government has the authority to sort religions into acceptable and unacceptable categories. You've handed the state exactly the power that school choice was designed to remove from it. And you've guaranteed—guaranteed—that a future administration will use that same power to exclude Christian schools, Jewish schools, or any other faith community that's currently politically inconvenient.
Do you think a Democratic governor in 2030 won't notice that Republicans established the precedent? They will notice. They will use it. The only question is which religious community they'll target first.
This isn't a slippery slope argument. It's logic. Precedents get applied. That's what they're for.
What Conservative Principles Actually Require
I'm a populist, not a libertarian, but even I can read the First Amendment. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The free exercise clause doesn't have an asterisk. It doesn't say "except for religions whose theology we find alarming" or "pending a national security review."
The Supreme Court has been remarkably consistent on this in recent years. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, the Court ruled 5-4 that states cannot exclude religious schools from public benefit programs solely because of their religious character. In Carson v. Makin in 2022, that principle was extended and strengthened. The legal trajectory here is not ambiguous. Texas and Florida will lose these fights in court.
But the deeper issue isn't legal—it's moral. If conservative politicians genuinely believe in school choice as a principle, they have to apply it as a principle. Not as a subsidy program for the religiously approved. Not as a funding mechanism for communities that vote Republican. As a principle. Every parent. Every faith. Every child.
The Hard Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
I know what the counter-argument is. Some parents don't want their voucher dollars flowing through a system that might fund schools teaching things they find objectionable. Some politicians are worried about Islamic schools with ties to foreign funding or extremist curricula.
Those are real concerns. Address them with real policy. Require financial transparency from all voucher-eligible schools, not just Islamic ones. Create curriculum standards that apply universally, not selectively. Enforce existing laws against teaching violence or sedition, which already cover every school regardless of religion.
What you cannot do is say: this group doesn't get to participate in parental freedom because of who they are. That's discrimination. It's un-American. And coming from the movement that built school choice on the promise of freedom from government interference in education, it's a breathtaking act of self-contradiction.
My kids go to a Christian school. I want them there. I want their education shaped by our faith. And because I want that for my kids, I have to want it for every kid. Including kids whose parents pray differently than I do. That's not weakness. That's conviction. The test of a principle isn't whether you apply it when it's easy. It's whether you hold it when it costs you something.
Texas and Florida are failing that test right now. And they'll keep failing it until someone with enough credibility in the conservative movement stands up and says: not this. Not in our name.
