Supreme Court already OK’d vouchers for parochial schools Re: “School subsidy bridges church, state,” March 18
Harry Jaffe’s column regarding vouchers for Catholic schools ignores fundamental principles of constitutional law.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly distinguished between direct and indirect aid to religious institutions. Indirect aid, like the D.C. voucher program, provides beneficiaries with vouchers that can be redeemed for services from select qualified providers. Such indirect aid is analogous to the government issuing a paycheck to an employee who, in turn, donates a portion of it to a religious institution.
Vouchers have been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court on numerous occasions so long as they are distributed without regard to religion.
This principle was previously upheld in Witters v. Washington Department of Services for the Blind, where the court allowed a beneficiary to use a vocational-training grant to become a minister. Likewise, in Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District, the court allowed a special-education voucher to be used by a student at a Catholic high school.
A misunderstanding of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, as manifest in Jaffe’s column, has resulted in repeated injustices to students at parochial schools. I urge him to be more legally accurate in the future.
Robert W. Carter Jr.
Odenton, Md.
Front-page headline should have been tsunami
Re: “Cyberbullies target teens across region,” March 13
I love your newspaper, but I was appalled when I saw this headline just as we were witnessing an earthquake and tsunami in Japan of epic biblical proportions on TV and the Internet. This was the fifth-worst tragedy in the history of the world, and the worst disaster Japan has suffered since World War II.
Obviously, when such an Armageddon-sized tragedy occurs, you should drop the headline you had planned and go with the more important one.
To make matters worse, the size of the ship/tsunami picture on the front page was minimized to accommodate your lengthy headline and the story about Japan was pushed back to page 13, while the cyberbully article ran on page 5. Are you kidding me? You need a new editor. Tsunamis always trump cyberbullies.
Linda Fischer
Annandale
Editor’s Note: The Japanese earthquake and tsunami occurred after deadline for a combined two-day edition, making it all but impossible to do even minimal first-day coverage of the event in that issue.
Individual mandate is needed in real world
Re: “A judicial drubbing for Obamacare,” Jan. 31
Health insurance is being compared to car liability insurance, but a more apt analogy is to collision insurance.
Here’s the difference: if the owner chooses not to purchase collision insurance and crashes into a lamppost, no one expects his insurance company (or taxpayers) to cover his expenses. But when he is delivered to an emergency room broken and unconscious, care is provided even if he chose not to purchase health insurance.
If we lived in a society so brutal that it condoned emergency rooms and ambulances refusing service to people who chose not to purchase insurance, the individual mandate might not be justified. But a judge striking it down with this dystopia in mind is ruling based on a society that doesn’t exist.
Gary Vandivera
Alexandria
