By Linda Murphy

The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled on June 25th, based on the Constitution and Law, to reject public tax funding for a state-wide Catholic Charter School. Oklahoma has always prohibited state tax dollars from being used to support religion. A Catholic church spokesman stated openly that their plans for a public funded school, St. Isidore of Seville, include teaching Catholicism.

The executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, acknowledges that public funding of St. Isidore is at odds with over 150 years of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but says they will take the case all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. The Court now consists of six Catholic members; two Protestant members: Ketanji Brown (appointed by President Biden) and Neil Gorsuch (former Catholic, attended Jesuit Preparatory School, now a liberal Episcopalian) and a Jewish member. The implications are that they expect to win the case and proceed with their plans to receive Oklahoma tax funding for St. Isidore of Seville, Catholic School.

State Superintendent Ryan Walters is challenging the State Supreme Court ruling and tried to intervene in the case when it was brought to the court by Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who vowed to uphold the Constitution and Law. The Supreme Court denied Walters’ efforts to be involved in the Court decision. Walters responded after the ruling by saying he was asking the Oklahoma Supreme Court to allow the Oklahoma State Department of Education “to defend its interest in distributing state aid without religious discrimination.” Walters said the Oklahoma Supreme Court got it wrong and he will fight to win the case at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Walter’s and the Oklahoma Catholic Conference’s position and argument are a new twist in interpretation that has been advanced by a group of attorneys working for the establishment of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic School. Politico magazine published an article, “Public Christian schools? Leonard Leo’s allies advance a new cause” 12-29-23. The writer provides extensive details about the millions of dollars funding this effort, which is being promoted by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. The archbishop of the Oklahoma City Archdiocese was appointed by the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church in 2010.

The Catholic Church has furthered its goal to receive taxpayer funding for Catholic schools in other countries, as is seen in Canada. The “Canadian Labour Market and Skills Researcher Network” produced a 2010 report (Working Paper No. 66), “Competition and Efficiency with Publicly Funded Catholic Schools.” The abstract states: “The province of Ontario has two publicly funded school systems: secular schools (known as public schools) that are open to all students, and separate schools that are limited to children with Catholic backgrounds.”

If the efforts to change Oklahoma’s public funding to cover Catholic education succeed, our state will lead the nation in aligning with Canada and other countries who are already on board. This would be a huge win for the global Roman Catholic Church. Politico reports “The 1.8 million-student Catholic education system received a lifeline through the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the case of Carson v. Makin, which required states with voucher systems to help students afford private schools to allow the money to be spent on religious academies. The influx of public money was already helping the Catholic Church to stave off parish closings, according to a 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research study that called vouchers “a dominant source of funding for many churches.”

Three days after the State Supreme Court rejected public funding for a statewide Catholic School, State Superintendent Ryan Walters made a public announcement at the June 28th State School Board meeting. Walters said that “Every teacher, every classroom in the state, will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.”

Walters told NBC that teachers would lose their license if they did not comply with his order. He told PBS NewsHour “We feel very confident in it moving forward and winning every legal case.” He said that is because of the Supreme Court.

Walters sent a memo to Oklahoma’s 509 Public School Districts stating that adherence to his order is mandatory, and that he would release instructions for compliance reporting and monitoring later. The memo said that the state Education Department may supply teaching materials for Bible instruction “to ensure uniformity in delivery.” He said that “Immediate and strict compliance is expected,”

The Oklahoma State Constitution and State Law are clear in stating that the authority to “mandate” is a power that belongs exclusively to the State Legislature not to the heads of State Agencies. State Agencies, including the State Department of Education, are in the “Executive Branch” of government along with the Governor who is the head of the Executive Branch. The three branches of Government: Legislative, Executive and Judicial have distinct roles, which are necessary to maintain a “balance of power.”

Clearly many Oklahomans are Christians who want to see our students fully educated including having knowledge about how the Bible has been quoted, referenced, and used throughout American history. The Bible was used in establishing our freedom and forging foundational documents. The Bible is found through-out the literature of Western Civilization.

Contrary to what we have heard repeatedly for years, frankly from both sides of politics, the use of the Bible in the classroom has always been legal in America and was upheld even in the famous 1963 Supreme Court case. The court ruled that the state of Pennsylvania was to stop mandating that the Bible be read daily in a required exercise. It is the very point that we need to understand today. State or Federal government mandated and enforced Bible curriculum from the Top-Down is NOT LEGAL but it is legal to use the Bible in the classroom.

It is legal to use the Bible as a supporting document. Here is the Oklahoma state law (Title 70) we already have for use of the Bible in school:

(1) 2004 Oklahoma passed a law: 70-24-106.1. to provide support for Oklahoma teachers to use supporting documents like the Ten Commandments and the Bible in teaching.

(2) 2010 Oklahoma passed a law: 70-11-103.11. for elective course offering on Old and New Testament; to provide a framework for school districts to use.

(3) 2024 Oklahoma passed a law: HB 1425 (which will be codified in Title 70) to provide a framework for school districts that have “release time” Bible Classes where students go off campus.

These laws help support teachers in the use of the Bible in Oklahoma public schools, but it was already legal to use the Bible even before the state laws were passed. The state laws help provide direction and steer the local school districts on a course that prevents lawsuits from those who want to remove the Bible from the public schools entirely. These laws preserve local control of education, which puts control in the hands of the citizens. Our representative government is answerable to the people who elect the local school board, which then hires the superintendent.

Oklahomans should be aware that public funding of a school teaching religion is not just an issue of parent’s rights to expand options for education and it is certainly not a matter of our state discriminating against anyone’s religion. At the heart of the matter is an effort to require the hard-working taxpayers of Oklahoma to pay for specific religious teaching, with which most citizens do not agree.

Important issues get lost in the flood of words we hear in daily broadcasts. Our forefathers put safeguards into our laws and into both our state and federal constitutions to protect us from what they were keenly aware of and fought to escape in Europe.

Linda Murphy was Oklahoma Governor Keating’s Education Advisor, Deputy Commissioner of Labor for Workforce Education and Training, Administrator of the Eastern Oklahoma Department of Labor, Member of the State Job Training Coordinating Council, and the Governor’s School-to-Work Council. She was a candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1994, 1998 and 2018. Murphy was appointed by Governor Keating as Secretary of Education, but was denied confirmation by the majority Democrat Education Committee, following her 49.5% statewide vote in 1994. She also served on the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women. More recently, she has served as chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party’s Committee on Education. She is chairman of the OK Educators Network. You may contact Linda at: lindalearn1@yahoo.com