Recently, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court decision struck down Pennsylvania’s statutory ban on Medicaid benefits for abortions. Around the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court granted review of Colorado’s denial of public subsidies to two Catholic preschools.
Both actions threaten the conscience of the taxpayer.
There is a healthy tradition in America of distinguishing between upholding a right and refusing public subsidies that pay the cost of exercising that right. Today, both liberals and conservatives are trying to erase that distinction by demanding taxpayer funding for their favored activities.
But taxpayers have beliefs, too. Those beliefs are violated when taxpayers are forced to support the exercise of rights they consider immoral.
In the abortion case, the Commonwealth Court majority had little choice but to find the existing Pennsylvania ban on funding abortions unconstitutional. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had earlier strongly suggested that it violated both the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Amendment and the state Constitution’s equal protection provisions. There was not much doubt that the higher court expected Commonwealth Court to invalidate the ban.
Denial of Medicaid funding for abortions is clearly discriminatory. Medicaid covers essentially all conditions affecting men and yet bars coverage for a procedure that only affects women. If the case had been about any other pregnancy related treatment, most people would probably agree that the funding ban was unconstitutional.
But abortion is different. That difference does not just involve the existence of prenatal life in the womb. The important difference in terms of public funding is that a substantial minority of taxpayers believe that abortion is murder and forcing them to pay for abortions is deeply offensive to those taxpayers.
If society is to work out a compromise on an issue like abortion, we should not provoke people by forcing them to pay for a practice some consider deeply immoral.
And the same is true of subsidizing discrimination against gay people through the use of public education subsidies, which is the issue in the Colorado case. Colorado pays for families to send children to the preschool of their choice, public or private, including faith-based programs. When two Catholic parish preschools in the Denver area said that admitting 4-year-olds with gay or transgender parents would violate their religious beliefs, Colorado refused to grant them an exception to its nondiscrimination rules. The Archdiocese of Denver and the two Catholic parishes sued. Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent history of decisions in the field of religious liberty, there is no doubt whatsoever that the plaintiffs will ultimately win the case and will receive public money despite the discrimination.
As is true with abortion funding, many taxpayers will consider this discrimination deeply offensive. Not only does the preschool policy target the innocent children involved, but, as a practical matter, the Catholic preschools are ignoring all other sinful parental relationships. If the parents of a child are divorced or unmarried, or run a drug ring or are mob hitmen, their child is welcome to attend.
Again, as in the case of abortions in Pennsylvania, Catholic preschools in Colorado are certainly free to exclude students based on religious considerations. The question is whether taxpayers should be required to subsidize such discrimination.
The answer to that question should be no.
If this society is to overcome our political differences, we are going to have to lower the temperature of our disagreements. One way to do that is to forego pursuing maximum political advantage in disputes over our goals. Abortion advocates pursue public funding not because such funding is necessary to the exercise of the right, but to validate the right to abortion. Taxpayers know that and resent it.
