This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 19th, 2004, and Caleb Brown,

the shifting landscape of education options for parents across the U.S. has, to put it mildly,

not come without controversy.

One lingering claim among opponents of broadening educational choice is made in the name of separating church and state

that allowing parents to use taxpayer funds to choose a religious education violates the

First Amendment.

Cato's Neil McCluskey explains the reality.

One of the chief complaints that I hear about school choice

is the notion, and I hear this almost exclusively from the left is I'm not

opposed to school choice but I don't want my tax dollars to pay for your religious education.

And of course it's not quite that simple.

Yes, it is one of the biggest complaints against school choice is, well, for a long time saying, well, it's just a violation of the Constitution.

If you were to allow people to take government money, so we're talking about a voucher in this case to a religious

school that would be a clear violation of the separation of church and state now

since 2002 the Supreme Court precedent is no that's not a violation of the separation of

church and state or we should say really more accurately the First Amendment

as long as the money is reaching a religious institution by the free choice of families,

there's no government establishment of religion.

It's just people freely deciding that they want religious schools.

We still hear the church state separation complaint, but now more often we hear, well, it's just

not right because we don't like what religious people sometimes

believe in, what their schools sometimes stand for, and so we don't think that that should

...