Another Assault on Religion in America

The other day I wrote about Attorney General William Barr's Notre Dame speech last October in which he pointed out how religious liberty in the U.S. is under assault. The post was scarcely up for two days before news came of a troubling example of what Mr. Barr was talking about.

Two Florida banks, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third, are pulling their donations, some $5.5 million, from a program designed to help many poor, minority children who attend private Christian schools. The program provides tax-credit scholarships for more than 100,000 children 70% of whom are black, Hispanic or multiracial.

Why did the banks end their participation in the program? Joy Pullman at The Federalist explains:

Fifty-eight percent of the children who participated in this program in 2015-16 had single mothers. Their average family income was $25,550, near the federal poverty line. Researchers found that “on average, students who choose the scholarship were struggling academically in their prior public school,” and that these struggling children bump up their achievement to match that of richer kids with better schools within several years of joining the program.

The banks ended their support for the poor minority children after a harassment campaign by the Orlando Sentinel. The newspaper went after Christian schools in articles accusing them of hating LGBT people due to religious teachings about sex that are shared by the majority of the world’s faithful, including Muslims and Jews. Then the newspaper contacted major donors to the scholarships, including Fifth Third and Wells Fargo, to pressure them into recanting. It worked.

“After the [Orlando Sentinel] story ran, Fifth Third changed its mind,” the Orlando Sentinel article on the banks’ withdrawal from the donations says.

If the Sentinel alleged that Christians teach hatred of LGBT people they completely mischaracterized Christian teaching. Moreover, the mischaracterization was either malicious or foolish. It'd be like characterizing a parent who believes her grown daughter is wrong to cohabit with her boyfriend as therefore hating her daughter. It's ridiculous, but poor children will now be paying for the paper's shallowness.

Moreover, it's an indication of the hypocrisy of the Orlando Sentinel that they singled out Christian schools and apparently expressed no concern over what Muslim schools teach their children about sexuality. Perhaps the "journalists" at the Sentinel calculated that Christians are a much safer target for economic punishment than are Muslims.

Pullman notes in conclusion that,

Meanwhile, publicly funded venues across Florida, including state universities, host Drag Queen Story Hour, and numerous public schools across the state, including public universities, teach students that it’s possible to change one’s sex from female to male or vice versa. One school district even threatened a male gym teacher for refusing to watch a female student in the locker room, a situation that is still unresolved.

Apparently, anything sexual is okay in Florida except the belief that some things sexual are not okay.