An old anti-Catholic law has resurfaced in Georgia

Matt Hadro
January 4, 2017

ATLANTA - An amendment from the 1870s that was once used to target Catholics is now being invoked in Georgia once again to challenge a scholarship program allowing children to attend religious schools.

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The constitutional clause in question is the state’s version of the Blaine Amendment, which dates all the way back to the 1870s.

Named after then-Speaker of the House James Blaine, the Blaine Amendment was originally intended to bar Catholic schools from receiving state funding, instead of the largely Protestant public school system. It was part of the anti-Catholic fervor of the time.

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Today, it is invoked on secularist grounds in many states to prohibit religious institutions - schools, charities, and hospitals - from receiving government funds. Its supporters claim that such funding violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment which forbids Congress from making “no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

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In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a four-person plurality opinion in Mitchell v. Helms, stated that “Consideration of the [Blaine] amendment arose at a time of pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general, and it was an open secret that ‘sectarian’ was code for ‘Catholic.’

“In short, nothing in the Establishment Clause requires the exclusion of pervasively sectarian schools from otherwise permissible aid programs, and other doctrines of this Court bar it,” the justices continued. “This doctrine, born of bigotry, should be buried now.”

https://cruxnow.com/cna/2017/01/04/old-anti-catholic-law-resurfaced-georgia/