New Hampshire Public Radio, which in its last fiscal year, received nearly $450,000 in federal tax monies from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, “shocked, shocked!” that parents who send their children to a small religious school might be the indirect beneficiaries of public assistance.
In June, 2021, the New Hampshire Legislature passed, and Governor Chris Sununu signed into law, an act establishing the Education Freedom Account program. The EFA program allows families with incomes up to 300 percent of the poverty level to receive vouchers for, among other educational expenses, tuition for private and religious schools.
There is no direct public funding of private or religious schools. Businesses receive a tax credit for donations to a private scholarship organization. That same private scholarship organization also receives public monies that would go to a child’s public-school education and grants it to parents to spend how they choose: on public schools outside of their immediate area, private schools, religious schools, or even home-schooling. The Children’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire is the current administrator of the program, which has been nationally praised as a model for educational freedom.
On June 6th, New Hampshire Public Radio published, on its website, an article originating in the Keene Sentinel, complaining that Immaculate Heart of Mary School in Richmond was a participant in the state voucher program.
The school’s offense? The traditional religious order which operates the school — the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary — has been arbitrarily designated a ‘hate group’ by the anti-Catholic bigots of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC is, of course, a lucrative bunco scheme which monetizes left-wing paranoia by inciting fear of conservative Christians.
Defaming innocent people can be a profitable enterprise. Last year, the SPLC took in north of $110 million.
The Sentinel article — a headline in search of a story — was likely intended to influence an upcoming vote in the New Hampshire Legislature to expand Educational Freedom Accounts, by raising the eligibility of a family of four to 425% of the federal poverty level.
The local state senator, Donovan Fenton (D-Keene), predictably, tried to create a moral panic: “It’s really scary where this EFA money is going and who it’s going to and who’s taking advantage of it,” he said. “The public should be furious and aware … we’re hemorrhaging money from the state for this program, for people who, you know, are teaching these religious issues that a lot of people don’t agree with or are labeled a hate group.”
Fenton is a longtime opponent of school choice who has voted against parental rights legislation. When not trying to disempower parents, Fenton — who was endorsed by the Planned Parenthood NH Action Fund — spends his time attempting to make abortion a constitutional right in New Hampshire.
One salient fact omitted by both the Sentinel and NHPR was that the very SPLC list which they cited, formed the basis of the discredited and retracted FBI Richmond Office memo, targeting Catholics. That document has now been repudiated by both the Director of the FBI, Christopher Wray and the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland.
No one from New Hampshire Public Radio contacted the Saint Benedict Center before publishing a smear piece, which accepted, at face value, the reckless, malicious, unfounded and self-serving allegations of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
On its website, NHPR proclaims its adherence to a Statement of Principles which demands, from its reporters and editors, honesty, accuracy and “scrupulous fairness.”
Apparently, the ordinary, elementary journalistic practice of seeking a response from the person or organization you are writing about does not rise to the level of scrupulous fairness for NHPR.
The issue that overshadows all of this is whether American parents will determine the education and the moral instruction of their children, or will it be the government, abetted, and in large measure controlled by, what is arguably the country’s most powerful special interest — the National Education Association, aka, the teachers union.
America’s public schools no longer impart traditional values — sometimes called the American Civil Religion — to their students. Nor are they neutral forums in the nation’s cultural conflicts.
Since the 1990’s or earlier, government schools have promoted explicit so-called sex education, the distribution of contraceptives — without parental consent — to minors, and programs, like “Gay/Straight Alliances,” which affirm homosexuality.
Now, they encourage children to believe that their gender is mutable, and that parents have no right to be aware of how the lives of their children will be radically and destructively altered.
In New Hampshire, the Department of Education recently revealed that a public school teacher took one of her students to an abortion clinic without informing the child’s parents.
Even before the current cultural revolution, the teaching of history was always infused with an intrinsic anti-Catholic bias.
Education is America’s largest industry. In 2021, taxpayers spent close to a trillion dollars funding public elementary and secondary schools.
The rising movement for parental choice in education is a mortal threat to this powerful industry, and to the permanent bureaucracy which administers it, and to the special interests which sustain it.
No oligarchy gives up its monopoly without a struggle. That struggle is now underway and is beginning to intensify.
One of the few positive prospects for the near term future of the United States is that the education monopoly is starting to resemble an overloaded ship — full of pestilence — that is beginning to take on water.
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C. Joseph Doyle is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. Since 2019, he has served as the Director of Communications for the Friends of Saint Benedict Center.
