The Becket Fund FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Douglas County School District v. Larue (2011-Present)

In March 2011, Colorado enacted The Choice Scholarship Program to help low-income families send their children to private schools of their choice (some of which were religious).

On June 21, 2011, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and several Colorado organizations and taxpayers in a Denver District Court to stop the scholarship program.  In Douglas County School District v. LaRue, the district court struck down the program, ruling that it violated a nineteenth-century state constitutional provision known as a Blaine Amendment.

Blaine Amendments are provisions in dozens of state constitutions that prohibit the use of state funds at “sectarian” schools.  They have an ugly history.  Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, our nation endured a rash of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bigotry. This “Know-Nothing” movement—decried at the time by Abraham Lincoln and in modern times by the U.S. Supreme Court—unleashed a spasm of religious discrimination at war with our traditions of religious liberty.  Its legacy persists to this day in the form of “Blaine Amendments,” which were adopted in numerous state constitutions in the late 1800s and early 1900s and were designed to suppress Catholic schools in favor of Protestant-dominated public schools.

On April 16, 2012, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed an amicus brief in the Douglas County School District appeal, shining a spotlight on the Colorado Blaine Amendment’s ugly past and its unconstitutional treatment of children in religious schools who simply wish to be treated the same as children in secular schools.