50 years ago — March 31, 1969
The issue of separation of church and state once again emerged when state proposals attempted to financially assist parochial schools. “The public school systems are those which are open to all children, regardless of class, race or religious affiliation; paid for by all citizens regardless of class, race or religious affiliation; and supervised, controlled, and criticized by all citizens regardless of class, race or religious affiliation. … [They] constitute in a pluralistic society, to borrow Jefferson’s felicitous term, one of our ‘elementary republics’ in which American children begin their adventure in free government. It is in the public school systems that we come to know one another out of our various traditions, respect one another as persons, and begin to work out some of our problems together in producing, hopefully, a responsible citizenry.” Religious liberty not only includes protection against one person having to support another person’s religion through taxes but also from being coerced to support one’s own religion. “Use of tax funds to support parochial school systems would constitute an ‘imposition of religion’ to employ the term of Alan Schwarz in a recent discussion of the establishment clause of the Constitution.”
A letter to the editor by James H. Smylie of Richmond, Virginia
