A central Maine Catholic school and a pair of organic farmers are challenging a state law requiring schools that receive public tuition funds to not discriminate against LGBTQ+ staff and students.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, is the second to challenge the law in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Maine’s ban on public funding for religious schools.
Keith and Valori Radonis, organic farmers from Whitefield who have five children, currently use the tuition program to send their two oldest children to Erskine Academy, a private school in South China, while their youngest child attends St. Michael School, a parish school in Augusta, according to the lawsuit.
The Radonises want to send their children to St. Dominic Academy, a private school with campuses in Lewiston and Auburn serving prekindergarten to 12th-grade students run by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland. But under an amendment to the Maine Human Rights Act, which took effect in October 2021, they are unable to use the public tuition program to send their kids there, the lawsuit states.
“As Catholic parents, we want to provide our children with an education that helps them grow in heart, mind and spirit, preparing them for lives of service to God and neighbor,” Keith and Valori Radonis said. “All families should have the option to provide the education that’s right for their children using Maine’s tuition program, including religious families like ours.”
Under the tuition program, parents can receive public funds to send their children to private schools when there are no public options nearby. That included religious schools, a practice that continued until the early 1980s, when Maine Attorney General Richard Cohen, a Republican, ruled sending public funding to religious schools violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
That practice became the target of a lawsuit in 2018, which eventually landed before the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 6-3 decision, the high court tossed Maine’s ban on public funding for religious schools in June 2022, saying it “effectively penalized the free exercise of religion.”
But before the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the Legislature amended the Maine Human Rights Act to prohibit schools that accept public funding from discriminating against LGBTQ+ staff and students, as well as requiring schools that permit religious expression to not discriminate against other religions.
The Becket Fund, a law firm that focuses on religious liberty and is representing the Radonises, St. Dominic Academy and the diocese, said that would mean Catholic schools would need to permit Baptist revival meetings if they held traditional Masses.
The law firm called the 2021 law an “end run” around the Supreme Court.
Already, two schools at the heart of the 2018 lawsuit, Bangor Christian Schools and Temple Academy in Waterville, said in depositions to the Supreme Court they wouldn’t accept public funds if it meant abiding by the anti-discrimination policy.
In March, Crosspoint Church, formerly known as Bangor Baptist Church and which operates Bangor Christian Schools, sued the state in U.S. District Court challenging the 2021 law, which it described as a “poison pill” for religious schools that may want to participate in the tuition program.
“Maine is willing to pay for kids to go to all-girls boarding schools in Massachusetts and public schools in Quebec, but parents who choose Catholic schools like St. Dominic — which have been educating Maine kids for more than a century — are still out in the cold,” said Adèle Auxier Keim, senior counsel at Becket.
