The SCOTUS decision on the president's travel ban is getting the most attention this week, but more consequential will be the decisive 7-2 opinion in the Trinity Lutheran case, overturning the so-called "Blaine amendment" in the Missouri state constitution.  Blaine provisions of the 1870s and 1880s were aimed at denying religious schools any form of government assistance, but they specifically allowed help for private secular schools.  (The help in question in this case was the relatively trivial matter of free playground rubber pellets, but the principle now applies across the board to many forms of assistance.) Such blatantly discriminatory laws were targeted at the burgeoning parochial schools in the United States begun after the Civil War, owing to the efforts of the large number of Catholic immigrants at the time, often German, as well as German Lutherans in the Midwest, who were keen to have their children educated in the native...(Read Full Post)