08-09-2003, 01:49 PM
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Veteran Member
Join Date: Nov 2001
Location: NCSU
Posts: 5,853
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Courts Weighing Rights of States to Curb Aid for Religion Majors
Courts Weighing Rights of States to Curb Aid for Religion Majors
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Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which opposes state financing for most religious education, said the Michigan statute might be too sweeping.
"The statute should probably read that persons preparing for the ministry or religious education are excluded," Mr. Lynn said.
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Ms. Becker's lawyers at the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative public interest law firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., emphasized what they called the unfairness of the distinction the Michigan law draws.
"An atheist committed to scientific materialism may study the Big Bang, the laws governing the subsequent organization of matter and, ultimately, the amphibian from which man is said to have evolved — all without forfeiting his scholarship," they wrote in court papers. "But Teresa must forfeit her scholarship if she wishes to discuss the Uncaused Cause that created the stuff of the Big Bang, and the notion that the laws that govern creation are not merely statistically improbable but so irreducibly complex that the heavens proclaim the glory of the Lord."
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:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
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Aaron Caplan, a staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington State, said that states should be free to decide what kinds of study to support. They can, for instance, offer scholarships for medical school but not law school. And while court decisions hold that states are free to offer scholarships for religious study, Mr. Caplan said, it does not follow that states should be required to do so.
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