Florida's public schools have been banned from being Christian for 150 years.
Now James Uthmeier just read that ban the last rites.
The Florida Attorney General issued a formal legal opinion this Holy Week declaring that his office will no longer enforce the state Constitution's ban on funding religious schools – because it violates the First Amendment.
The Law Uthmeier Just Buried Was Born from Anti-Catholic Bigotry
Florida's "No Aid Provision" looks neutral on paper.
"No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution," the provision reads.
What that provision doesn't tell you is where it came from.
These no-aid clauses spread through state constitutions in the 1870s and 1880s – the same era Protestant-dominated legislatures were panicking about Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants flooding American cities and building their own schools.
They didn't want those kids getting one dime of public money.
The bigotry got dressed up in neutral constitutional language and has been sitting there ever since.
Uthmeier named it directly.
"Many have tried to force a modern, secularist gloss upon the First Amendment," he wrote in his nine-page opinion, "but that reading cannot be squared with the overwhelming evidence of religion's – and specifically Christianity's – influence at the Founding and its intended role within our constitutional order."
https://twitter.com/AGJamesUthmeier/status/2039731760263499929?s=20
He cited Joseph Story's 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, which recorded that the prevailing American sentiment at the Founding was that Christianity deserved state encouragement – so long as individual conscience and religious freedom remained protected.
That's the original intent.
Buried under generations of secular reinterpretation.
The Supreme Court Already Handed Him This Win
The left is calling Uthmeier a radical.
He's not.
He's following a decade of Supreme Court rulings that methodically dismantled these exact provisions – and the left lost every time.
In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer that Missouri violated the First Amendment when it denied a church school access to a public grant program solely because it was religious.
Chief Justice John Roberts called that exclusion "odious to our Constitution."
In 2020, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue went further.
Once a state decides to fund private education, Roberts wrote, "it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."
In 2022, Carson v. Makin closed the loop.
The 6-3 conservative majority ruled that Maine violated the Free Exercise Clause by barring families from using public tuition vouchers at religious schools.
"The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools – so long as the schools are not religious," Roberts wrote. "That is discrimination against religion."
Three Supreme Court cases.
The same answer every time.
https://twitter.com/AGJamesUthmeier/status/2039717446173503783?s=20
Uthmeier isn't breaking new ground – he's applying what SCOTUS already decided directly to Florida law.
What Changes for Florida Families
Two specific laws are now on Uthmeier's no-enforce list.
First: the ban blocking students at religious colleges from accessing Florida's EASE grant – the Effective Access to Student Education program that provides scholarships to private nonprofit schools.
A student at a secular private college can access those funds today.
A student at a Christian college cannot.
Uthmeier calls that a "blanket exclusion of all religious entities" that violates the First Amendment – and he's done defending it in court.
Second: the prohibition on religious charter schools.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently run.
Florida law currently requires they be nonreligious – meaning a group of Christian parents cannot start a classical charter school even while secular charter schools operate freely across the state.
That ends now.
Uthmeier also made a constitutional argument the left desperately doesn't want discussed: the Establishment Clause was written to restrain the federal government, not the states.
Several states had officially established churches at the time of the Founding.
The First Amendment was designed to keep Congress out of that arrangement – not to impose mandatory secularism on states that wanted to encourage Christianity.
That's not a fringe position.
That's what the Founders actually wrote.
This Is Bigger Than Florida
Thirty-eight states have similar no-aid provisions baked into their constitutions.
Every one of them is now legally exposed after Espinoza and Carson.
Uthmeier is the first attorney general to put the full weight of his office behind what the Supreme Court already decided – refusing not just to enforce the provision, but to defend it when challenged.
Here's what fires me up about this story.
The same people who scream about historical injustice at every opportunity are defending a constitutional provision that exists because Protestant legislators didn't want Catholic immigrant children getting school funding.
And for generations they used it as a weapon against every Christian parent who wanted their tax dollars to follow their child to a school that shared their values.
That's over.
Sources:
- Liv Caputo, "Uthmeier: Florida Constitution's ban on state dollars for religion violates First Amendment," Florida Phoenix, April 3, 2026.
- Staff Report, "State can fund religious charter schools, 'Encourage' religion, Uthmeier says," Washington County News, April 3, 2026.
- Amy Howe, "Court strikes down Maine's ban on using public funds at religious schools," SCOTUSblog, June 21, 2022.
- John Bursch, "US Supreme Court upholds religious liberty, forbids religious discrimination," The Hill, July 2, 2020.
- Heritage Foundation, "With Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court Closed the Book on Religious Discrimination in School Choice," The Heritage Foundation, 2022.
