As for the Supreme Court, it now has a 6-3 conservative majority that strongly favors religious rights and in a series of recent decisions has strengthened the free exercise clause, sometimes at the expense of the establishment clause.
But even in deep-red Oklahoma, where President Donald Trump won every county in last year’s election, not everyone is on board with Walters’ hope to water down the establishment clause.
Notably, state Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a fellow Republican, vigorously opposes the religious schools plan, to the extent that he filed his own legal challenge against it, which is what led to the Supreme Court’s involvement.
“We deserve intellectual honesty on this issue. It’s about religious indoctrination,” he said in an interview.
Drummond agreed that attempts to allow prayers in schools could be next on the agenda if the Supreme Court endorses the school proposal.
“The Supreme Court can decide how far it wants to go,” Drummond said.
Walters, a former high school teacher, strongly supports the charter school plan, which would funnel taxpayer dollars directly to an entity controlled by the Catholic Church.
But, as his Bible distribution plan shows, he doesn’t want to stop there.
He told NBC News he also believes the Supreme Court’s landmark 1962 Engel v. Vitale ruling that outlawed prayers in public schools should be overturned. The court held in a case arising from New York that the reading of a nondenominational prayer in class, in which students were not required to participate, violated the establishment clause.
The ruling is considered to be such a milestone that it features in high school Advanced Placement government classes, which Walters himself taught, and in the federal judiciary’s own educational materials.
“I think they were dead wrong on that. Individuals have the right to express their religious beliefs. That does not stop in a school building,” Walters said of the decision.
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