http://southflorida.metromix.com/politics/article/danation-todays-special-the/371563/content<snip>
The other proposed constitutional amendment that has generated controversy materialized last week, when the state's Taxation and Budget Reform Commission voted to ax the constitutional ban on state funding for religious institutions, which opened the door for a revival of former Gov. Jeb Bush's school-vouchers program, which the courts killed in 2004. Good Lord, but Jeb's tentacles reach everywhere. The man will always be with us, influencing the state from behind the sequestered rooms of his Coral Gables high-rise, rather like a latter-day Howard Hughes, only more evil and less neurotic. Vouchers are, of course, an excellent way to snuff out an already sagging public-education system in Florida. This is great if you view a child's education as a useful commodity as opposed to, say, an education. It's the sort of free-market-as-panacea solution we've come to expect from Jeb and his ilk. But, of course, in the meantime, we're left with cripplingly underfunded public schools, the possible government regulation of private schools and a bunch of parents holding vouchers for expensive academies that, even with the vouchers, they still may be unable to afford. And where does it end? How long until the Bible becomes the commonly accepted textbook for world-history classes?
But more than just the end of public education as we know it, the proposed amendment to end the ban on state funding for religious institutions opens up all sorts of potentially disastrous doors. Whenever people arguing one side of a political debate or another claim the Founding Fathers would be on their side, I tend to grit my teeth. It's the polar opposite of saying the Nazis would be on the side of one's opponent. But in this case, it's apropos. Freedom of religion is one of this country's founding principles.
And public funding of religious institutions would invariably favor some over others — or is it really possible that our state Legislature would give funds to Wiccan covens, radical Islamic madrassas or some other currently out-of-vogue sect? Clearly not, and while those are extreme examples, it's easy to imagine a heavily Christian Legislature that overlooks funding Jewish programs, or even the most well-funded and well-lobbied Christian sects getting more funding than lesser lights.
Such favoritism is perhaps what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote, "Believing … that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and state."