The nation’s highest court is hearing arguments from two consolidated lawsuits. The first is St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, named for the diocese that is suing Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who blocked it.
The second lawsuit, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, is named for the charter school board that approved Isidore’s application.
Erika Donalds leads the Center for Education Opportunity at the America First Policy Institute. She tells AFN the issue before the court is over state government permitting a faith-based charter school to be part of a non-religious public school system.
“In the state of Oklahoma, they denied the ability of a religious charter school to exist —actually, a religious virtual charter school," she explains. "And this case is going all the way to the Supreme Court to see if charter schools, if a charter school law, can discriminate because a school is religious versus not."
According to the ScotusBlog website, after the state board approved St. Isidore’s application, which happened in 2023, Attorney General Drummond, a Republican, sued to stop it. He went to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and won, after the state’s highest court agreed state law requires charter schools to be non-religious.
Phillip Sechler, an attorney at Alliance Defending Freedom, tells AFN the Oklahoma court did, in fact, cite state law about non-religious charter schools. The ADF attorney predicts, however, St. Isidore will win its appeal because Drummond’s legal position is upholding religious discrimination.
"We feel very confident about the case because the Supreme Court, three times in the last eight years, has made it clear that discrimination in a government program, based on religion, is odious to the Constitution,” Sechler tells AFN.
In the Scotusblog story, the writer also cites three rulings – all of them upholding the free exercise of religion – that that have come before the nation’s highest court in that eight-year time period. Those rulings came from legal challenges in Missouri, Montana, and Maine.
