Oklahoma's Bible education order is part of a larger Christian nationalist takeover plan

The state's role is key

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump square off tonight in the first of at least two election debates. The meeting will make history as the earliest general election debate ever held, as well as possibly the most dispiriting. Polls suggest that Americans who watch will be asking themselves just how we wound up having to choose between these guys again; even most Democrats would prefer a different nominee than Biden. This election is one to be endured and white-knuckled.

I’ll be watching the debate on a plane — I’m emailing this from my tiny seat right now— en route home from Northern California, where I was covering a very remarkable ballot initiative fight. I won’t have any instant reaction to the debate, but if something worth writing about occurs, I’ll be on it tomorrow along with the weekly wrap-up email for paid subscribers.

There’s lots to discuss today, including a huge ruling out of Oklahoma in a little-watched but ultra-consequential case, the Supreme Court, and a review of this week’s biggest primary election.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters today declared that all of the state’s public schools will be required to incorporate the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, into their curricula at every grade level.

“The Bible is one of the most historically significant books and a cornerstone of Western civilization, along with the Ten Commandments,” Walters said in a release accompanying the announcement. “They will be referenced as an appropriate study of history, civilization, ethics, comparative religion, or the like, as well as for their substantial influence on our nation’s founders and the foundational principles of our Constitution.”

The announcement comes just days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled overwhelmingly to prohibit the state from funding a Catholic charter school. The 7-1 decision was overwhelming but straightforward. In Oklahoma, charter schools are public schools, which demands that they be nonsectarian.

“St. Isidore’s educational philosophy is to establish and operate the school as a Catholic school,” Justice James R. Winchester, a Republican appointee, wrote in his majority opinion. “Under both state and federal law, the state is not authorized to establish or fund St. Isidore.”

The church’s charter school was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the radical Christian nationalist legal nonprofit that has been working for decades to chip away at the wall between church and state — Speaker Mike Johnson used to work for the ADF, while Sen. Josh Hawley’s wife is currently one of its top litigators. This case is one of several “religious freedom” education cases that the organization is pursuing at the moment as part of a larger strategy.

“We'll probably end up with a variety of different decisions across the country,” Kevin Welner, a professor of education at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me. “That's intentional because the US Supreme Court is more likely to take cases if there is a split among other courts. The idea is to have the US Supreme Court answer this question of whether or not to extend Carson v. Macon to include charter schools.”

Carson v. Macon was the SCOTUS decision in 2022 that overturned Maine’s ban on sending public money to private religious schools. It marked a milestone in the ADF’s decades-long effort to pervert the concept of “religious liberty,” which is at the core of its effort to blow up the traditional paradigm of secular education and government. The ADF wants the Supreme Court to rule that charter schools, which are publicly funded and accountable to public standards, are actually private schools, which would mean that they couldn’t be treated differently than nonsectarian schools by the state.

Such a ruling would produce a domino effect that would ultimately wind up forcing the public to fully fund bigotry and exclusion.

“The next step is that they also have to be allowed to run their school as a religious school, because otherwise you’re violating their free exercise rights,” Welner explained. “The next step is that they can proselytize, have school prayers, and infuse their curriculum with religious teaching. Can they discriminate against kids who are gay? Kids whose parents are gay? If that discrimination is claimed to be rooted in religious beliefs, there's concern that the Supreme Court would say yes, it’s a violation of free exercise if the state applies anti-discrimination laws against to the church.

“In other words, if the state steps in and says, ‘you can't discriminate,’ that's discrimination.”

It’s ultra-Orwellian, but hardly beyond the pale for this current Supreme Court and Christian nationalist movement. Yesterday, Speaker Johnson and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, two titans of the war on public education and secular society, spoke openly about their ongoing effort to block and repeal the Biden administration’s latest update to Title IX, which protects LGBTQ+ from discrimination in schools.

“It’s having a very devastating effect. It’s something that is a great alarm to all of us,” Johnson said, presumably speaking on behalf of bigots who want to discriminate against queer kids. Johnson also discussed the planned House vote to overturn the new rule, which Biden will veto if it somehow makes it through the Senate.

How far will they go?

Walters’s latest gambit is designed, much like the new Louisiana law requiring public school classrooms to display the 10 Commandments, to get to the Supreme Court. Given Walters’s obvious ideological motivations and effort to infuse public education with Christianity, it’d be impossible to argue that he sees the Bible as simply a historical document, as he tried to frame it in his announcement today.

That said, that may not matter to conservatives on the Supreme Court.

“It's hard to see this particular court slamming on the brakes and saying, ‘Hope, that's as far as we're gonna go,’” Welner told me. “It's easier to see this court saying, ‘Hey, look, we've gotten to this point and now we're gonna take our basic core argument and we're gonna keep applying it, because it’s from our understanding of the Constitution.”

This term’s most egregious decisions were focused on gutting the state’s ability to regulate business and prevent big money donors from lavishing government officials with gifts (no coincidence there). At first glance, it may seem that they moderated on challenges to abortion and reproductive rights, but it’s far more likely to say that they punted on what will be deeply unpopular decisions, as they did today with their dismissal in the Idaho emergency abortion ban case.

The court didn’t rule either way in the joint case, Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, but instead dismissed it as “improvidently granted.” That means that emergency abortions can legally continue for now, but the court made no promises about the future, and it’s likely to be a different story after the election in November.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito voted against dismissing the case and stand ready to sentence women to death at the first opportunity; they’ll likely get their wish soon enough, but the long term future is a bit more unwritten.

Assuming Democrats let them continue to be corrupt grifters with impunity, they are likely to stay on the court until either a Republican holds the White House or they die in office. If Donald Trump gets to nominate a few more justices from Leonard Leo’s assembly line of young, far-right ideologues, the court is probably fully cooked for the next three decades.

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The silence spoke volumes

Westchester County Executive George Latimer trounced incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, a race that may come back to haunt the party in November.

It was a deceptively complicated race, but for many people the takeaway is going to be clear: As Democratic leaders publicly worry about losing young Black voters, they nonetheless sat idly by as AIPAC pummeled a Black incumbent popular with young people into oblivion in order to elect a 70-year-old white conservative with a spotty record on race.

Personally, I also think the media comes away with egg on its face, because it seems that as if nobody in any major political newsroom bothered to run Latimer’s name through Google. Either that or they discovered his history of scandals, supporting racist housing policy, or sketchy bizarre and self-inflicted financial scandals.

The reality is more nuanced, as Bowman faced some real structural disadvantages and also did not run a campaign that made sense for the circumstances.

First, a new Congressional map shifted most of the district from his home turf in the Bronx to Westchester, where Latimee has been a political fixture for nearly four decades. Second, the conservative pro-Israel lobby’s record $16 million barrage against Bowman, a critic of the country’s policies toward Palestinians. And third, because the new suburban iteration of the district has a large Jewish population, it helped maximize the effectiveness of that money.

Let’s tackle the mistakes first, to get them out of the way.

Bowman became a rising star thanks to a brash new kind of politics that Democrats so often eschew, but his combativeness also wound up backfiring this year. Some of that is unfairly a consequence of the “angry black man” trope, but he also did himself no favors with comments casting doubt on reports of Hamas sexually assaulting Israeli women on October 7th. Yes, Israel’s government has been absolutely monstrous and has lied relentlessly since that horrible day, but rape denialism comes off as defending Hamas, not calling out a government for exploiting a tragedy.

He ultimately corrected himself and apologized, but it’s hard to walk that back, especially when much of your campaign — or at least the campaigns run by your allies — was focused on complaining about AIPAC.

Latimer attacked him on some pretty chincy stuff, like his principled vote against the infrastructure bill, which happened three years ago and was done in protest of the corporate wing of the party’s killing popular social programs. Bowman was proven right, too, because those things never passed.

But instead of running on some of those ultra-popular policies, which certainly appeal to people in many parts of Westchester, or even putting Latimer on the defensive by going after his enormous resume of past mistakes and character defects, he just wound up making the race about his own misfortune.

That said, it’s even more distressing that there was no consequence for Latimer being so robust in his defense of Israel’s genocide that he even criticized Joe Biden — a man who protestors call “Genocide Joe!” — for calling out Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of relentless, unapologetic ethnic cleansing.

Incumbent disadvantage

The DCCC exists to flip seats and protect incumbents, and Democratic leaders have gone to bat for incumbents with reprehensible records that run counter to ostensible party values and the rule of law.

Look no further than 2022, when party leadership went all-in to help Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar — an anti-abortion conservative whose office had just been raided by the FBI — fend off a challenge by Jessica Cisneros, a progressive young woman, even when it was clear that the Supreme Court would be overturning Roe v. Wade just months later. None of that mattered — the party raised millions of dollars and flew James Clyburn to South Texas to protect their anti-choice incumbent against a pro-choice challenger.

This year, that incumbency rule went out the window.

Yes, the DCCC technically endorsed Bowman, but there was no real effort to help him. And because Hillary Clinton backed Latimer over Bowman and the chairman of the New York Democratic Party donated to Latimer’s campaign, the challenger received what would seem to most people as the official blessing of the party. Former Rep. Mondaire Jones’ decision to stab him in the back also hurt, though at least he’s experiencing some funny comeuppance for it.

Democratic leaders’ appeasement of these billionaire conservative donors is not going to spare them being targeted in the long run. Instead, it’s just going to invite future primary challenges against Democrats — they went after lots of mainstream ones in 2022, remember — and further fracture the party. That will only make it easier for conservatives to win in general elections.

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