Now a law firm that defends religious liberty wants to know why.
First Liberty Institute is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case involving three families whom the firm says have been targeted for their Christian beliefs.
The State of California has several charter schools that offer homeschool programs. Families who choose this option receive an account with funds they can use for school materials and curriculum.
But three families aren’t able to access these funds.
John and Breanna Woolard; Hector and Diana Gonzales; and Carrie Dodson are all devout Christians raising school-age children, according to First Liberty. Their Christian faith is central to who they are and instilling that faith in their children through education is of the utmost importance to them.
But the state has told these families they can’t use public funds to purchase curriculum, materials or classes that are religious in nature — or even mention religion.
Some schools even refused to accept or award credit for student work samples that reflect a child’s religious perspective. One of the firm’s clients was even expelled from a charter school because the student selected a religious curriculum.
“California has a rule that says that if you use anything religious in the program, no matter how good it is … those types of things would not be able to be used in the program,” Hiram Sasser, an attorney with First Liberty, said on “Washington Watch” Tuesday.
A federal district court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the families in June of 2024, calling their efforts a “public homeschool” along the way.
A three-judge 9th Circuit panel upheld the decision on appeal. The families were denied again before a hearing of the full 9th Circuit in March. Five judges dissented from the majority opinion of 22 others.
Judge Patrick Bumatay called the majority’s opinion “profoundly wrong” and said risks allowing the state to deny any benefits to families of faith by simply declaring the benefit to be “public.”
“If a parent teaching her own children at her own kitchen table, with books she chose herself, counts as a government program then nothing is safe from that logic,” Bumatay wrote.
“This is private education that California has decided they would like to subsidize. If they're going to have that program, then they're not allowed” to exclude content of religious nature, even secular content from a religious publisher. “That would all be excluded under the California plan,” Sasser told show host Jody Hice.
The state is showing “blatant hostility” to any kind of religious content, Sasser said.
First Liberty is hoping the Supreme Court will give their case a look.
A previous First Liberty case — Carson v. Makin decided in June of 2022 — could play a key role in determining an outcome for California.
The Maine idea
Maine has many rural school districts that don't operate their own public high schools. Instead, Maine had a program under which parents in those districts could receive tuition assistance to send their children to an eligible public or private school of their choice.
But since 1981, Maine had required schools receiving the assistance to be "nonsectarian,” squashing the ability of families to choose religious schools.
The Court then ruled 6-3 that Maine violated the First Amendment by excluding religious schools from a state tuition-assistance program.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the six-member majority, said Maine's exclusion violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
The key principle was If a state creates a generally available public benefit, it generally cannot exclude people or institutions from that benefit because of their religious character or religious exercise.
“For whatever reason, California did not get the memo. So now we're seeking a Supreme Court review to see if we can get this resolved in the same way we had to with the state of Maine,” Sasser said.
