Vouchers’ secret bigotry: How your tax dollars fund anti-LGBT hate

[DonViejo]

Outraged when you read about a school firing a gay teacher or expelling a gay student? You may be paying for it

KATIE MCDONOUGH

This is the pattern: Every few weeks or so, a news story appears about an LGBT teacher who was fired by a religious school because of his or her sexuality, or a private school is exposed for having an explicit policy of rejecting LGBT students and families. Progressive news sites (like this one) circulate these stories with considerable and justified outrage, but all too often the story stops there — with strongly registered disappointment that private schools are legally empowered to discriminate against people because of who they are. Time passes, these cases recede into the white noise of the news cycle; rinse, repeat.

There is no doubt that what these schools do to LGBT faculty and students is despicable, but what’s often absent from the coverage of these cases is the fact that, in many states across the country, taxpayers are subsidizing their anti-LGBT agenda through state-sponsored voucher programs.

The connection between public dollars and the discrimination of private religious schools became abundantly clear last month when news broke that a Christian school in North Carolina with a “biblical morality code” — which, among other provisions, banned LGBT students or children from LGBT families from enrolling — was eligible for the state’s newly introduced, taxpayer-subsidized voucher program.

After receiving considerable scrutiny from the media, Democratic lawmakers in the state Legislature and members of the Wilmington community, Myrtle Grove Christian School announced on Tuesday that — while it will continue to discriminate against LGBT students and families — it will not accept vouchers from the state. This is good news for North Carolina taxpayers, but the (partial) attrition of one school is not nearly sufficient to ensure that the public isn’t paying for anti-LGBT hate.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/vouchers_secret_bigotry_how_your_tax_dollars_fund_anti_lgbt_hate/

[idwiyo]

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