Messages from the Supreme Knight and Supreme Chaplain t was good news when the U.S. Supreme Court last fall refused to hear a legal challenge to the Milwaukee program, which provides vouchers to qualifying children to attend the school of their choice. Good news, too, was a ruling in January by the state Supreme Court of Arizona upholding a law letting parents claim a tax credit for contributions to a qualifying tuition support organization, with money going to church-sponsored schools. And most recently the state of Florida adopted a voucher program that also lets such schools participate. In Pennsylvania, the state council of the Knights is supporting, with resources and person power, a pilot school choice program that will come before the state legislature.
Proponents maintain that prospects for passage of voucher legislation have never been better.
Developments like these are important in several ways. For one thing, they mark efforts to work out a new and more positive relationship between church and state. The court reinforced this stance over the years in a series of increasingly outrageous decisions that hit bottom in the mid-1980s. Since then, however, the Supreme Court has begun a slow turnaround. Central to it is the understanding that, rather than requiring hostility between church and state, the Constitution is open to friendly interaction between the two in pursuit of public goals.