How obsessed is the Left with homosexual and transgender “justice”?
Enough to cut impoverished little kids out of government food-assistance programs because they attend a school that does not worship at the same-sex and transgender altar?
Consider a court case out of El Cajon, California. Church of Compassion in that San Diego–area town runs a preschool and day-care center that feeds low-income children with government-financed meals. Because the center, called Dayspring Christian Learning Center, is run by a conservative Christian church whose religious beliefs do not align with the government-mandated sexual agenda — they believe in traditional marriage and biological determination of sex — the state has cut them out of the statewide food-assistance program.
Recent Supreme Court decisions bear directly on the Church of Compassion case. The Court has reinforced religious schools’ rights to funds that governments make available to other private educational establishments.
For nearly 20 years the center has participated in the program, receiving between $3,500 and $4,500 a month to feed impoverished children. El Cajon is home to a large immigrant population, including migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Mexico, according to a lawsuit filed by three religious-liberty advocate groups earlier this year. As many as 20,000 Chaldeans (Iraqi Christians) live in this East County town of approximately 100,000. Nearly 28 percent of the city’s residents were born outside the United States, and approximately 19 percent live below the poverty level. Forty percent of the kids attending the preschool qualify for free meals under the state program.
But now the state of California is cutting them out of the food-assistance program because the school they attend will not bend the knee to the state’s new aberrant sexual orthodoxy.
Dayspring, according to the lawsuit, “maintains sex-separated bathrooms and dress codes for boys and girls based on their biological differences and cannot agree to use any child or employee’s ‘preferred’ pronouns that do not correspond to biological sex. The Church and Dayspring also only hire those who share and live out their religious beliefs, including their beliefs about human sexuality.”
The blame for this outrage can be laid at the doorstep of Title IX — or, to be precise, the Biden administration’s recently expanded interpretation of the definition of “sex” in that 1972 law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. That redefinition was adopted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) to bar religious organizations that subscribe to traditional beliefs about human sexuality from the program.
The government’s problem is, by cutting out Church of Compassion from the program, they have violated a host of civil rights and federal laws. The suit claims the new government directives violate the Free Speech, Free Exercise, and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment, as well as other federal statutes.
Reads the suit:
The government does not have the authority to force religious institutions to compromise their deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs and practices about human sexuality, capitulate to the new SOGI [sexual orientation and gender identity] Rules, or pressure religious groups and people to assimilate to conflicting sexual philosophies.
Recent Supreme Court decisions bear directly on the Church of Compassion case. The Court has reinforced religious schools’ rights to funds that governments make available to other private educational establishments. In the 2020 decision Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the justices concluded, “A State need not subsidize private education [b]ut once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” In Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, from 2017, the Court said the state of Missouri could not withhold a grant to a church school to rubberize its playground even though it offered grants to private schools, nonprofit day-care centers, and other nonprofits to do the same thing.
In the 2022 case Carson v. Makin, the Court ruled that the state of Maine could not withhold funds to religious schools that it made available to other private schools; it could not “identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.”
Yet, says the suit, “that is what Defendants have done: They have excluded the Church and Dayspring from the Food Program because of their religious character, beliefs, and/or exercise.”
Very similar is a case in Florida from last August. The Biden administration attempted to take kids’ lunches away simply because they attended a religious school, Grant Park Christian Academy in Tampa. When Alliance Defending Freedom intervened, the government backed down.
Dean Broyles, attorney for the Church of Compassion and head of the National Center for Law and Policy, one of the three parties suing California, told the San Diego CBS affiliate back in March when the suit was filed:
It is immoral that California is holding hungry children hostage to its draconian desire to coercively control the Church of Compassion and Dayspring’s religious beliefs and employment practices. Whom churches employ has nothing to do with effectively feeding needy kids, yet the CDSS aggressively abused its power by forcibly imposing its new statist sexual orthodoxy mandates on our clients.
How intent is the government to bring to heel those who disagree with the new sexual orthodoxy? They’ll take food out of the mouths of impoverished kids to make their point.
