South Dakota's Legal Legacy Of Bigotry

George Will's column today tells the story of how New York State's Blaine Amendment is limiting the activities of a man, Rev. Michael Faulkner, who wants to open a religiously based school in Harlem.  What is the Blaine Amendment? 

Republican James G. Blaine came within 1,047 votes of becoming president. He lost New York, and hence the White House, by that margin to Grover Cleveland in 1884. New York's large Catholic population loathed Republicans after a Presbyterian clergyman, speaking in Blaine's presence, said the Democratic Party's antecedents were ''rum, Romanism and rebellion.''

Protestants resented the impertinence of Catholic immigrants who founded schools that taught Catholicism as forthrightly as public schools then taught Protestantism. Protestants thought a public school should be, in Horace Mann's words, a ''nursery of piety'' - of Protestant piety - dispensing ''judicious religious instruction,'' judiciousness understood as Protestantism.

In 1875, Blaine, hoping anti-Catholicism would propel him to the presidency, unsuccessfully tried to amend the U.S. Constitution to stipulate that no public money shall go to schools ''under the control of any religious sect.'' The pervasive Protestantism was not considered sectarian. Eventually 37 states passed similar amendments to their constitutions. Congress required Blaine provisions in the constitutions of new states entering the union.

South Dakota is one of those states that was required to have a "Blaine Amendment" in its constitution.  It is still there.  The "Blaine" aspects to Article VI, Section 3 are those denying any public funds for religious institutions.  Is it not time to repeal this relic of the bigotries of a bygone era? 

BTW, Will points out that Rev. Faulkner is attempting to have the New York Amendment  thrown out by the courts as a violation of the First Amendment.  There might be a "free exercise" argument here, but it is a weak one.  The proper move, in New York and here, is to remove this ancient bigotry through the democratic process.