Thanks to Ed Brayton for pointing out this story from KOCO about a public schoolteacher from Blackwell, Oklahoma who will soon be traveling to Africa to do mission work. Not medical work in the Ebola hot zone, mind you, but religious mission work in faraway Rwanda. It’s already been noted how ridiculous it is to act like “Africa” is all one massive intermixing population all at equal risk of contracting this terrible disease, in articles like this one at HuffPo. This depth of geographical ignorance borders on xenophobic, among other unpleasant things.
What has been overlooked (so far as I’ve yet seen) is that the public school in question has promised to pay for three weeks of self-imposed quarantine, thereby indirectly appropriating public funds to further the Christian religion.
Needless to say, it is plainly unconstitutional in Oklahoma for “public money or property” to be “appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of . . . any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher.”
While I’m generally in favor of more support for our public schoolteachers, the last thing we need to be doing is paying out state monies to facilitate off-duty religious mission work. It comes down to this: Who should cover the costs and risks of undertaking international mission work, the church or the state? The answer is perfectly straightforward, and it’s been written into our state constitution for exactly as long as Oklahoma has been a state.
