Even Justice Scalia Would Agree

September 30, 2025

Good Tuesday morning

Mike Curtin’s credentials are impeccable.

He is the former editor and associate publisher for the Columbus Dispatch, a two-term state lawmaker who served on the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission.

Curtin recently wrote a deep-dive article looking at the history of funding public schools with taxpayers in Ohio and the decision by voters 175 years ago to stop tax dollars from going to private, religious schools.

You can read Curtin’s excellent article here: Why Ohioans said private schools shouldn’t be funded with our money 174 years ago | Opinion

Curtin points out what voters were thinking on June 17, 1851 when they voted to adopt an Ohio Constitution that explicitly states no tax dollars shall go to private, religious schools.

Why does this matter with our lawsuit?

Curtin writes: “these questions are paramount because the (Ohio Supreme) court’s majority (6-1) Republicans all profess fidelity to originalist judicial philosophy – to apply the law as written and understood at the time of its adoption.”

Curtin quotes current Ohio Supreme Court justices on the idea of originality.

Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy vows: “As justices, we are required to faithfully, fairly and impartially uphold the law as written. We do not rewrite it or legislate from the bench.”

Curtin quotes Justice R. Patrick DeWine (he’s Gov. Mike DeWine’s son) from a December article for the Ohio State Law Journal pledging adherence to “an original public meaning approach to the Ohio Constitution.”

Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page, who ruled in June that the EdChoice private school voucher program is unconstitutional on three counts, quoted “the plain words of delegates to Ohio’s Constitutional Convention of 1850-51, who adopted language to ensure school funds of the state would be used solely to support common (public) schools.”

Curtin points out: “On Dec. 5, 1850, delegate Samson Mason, a Clark County lawyer, explained the common-school language was intended to ensure “the whole religious community in fact shall be forever excluded from any participation in the school fund of the state, and that because they are religious.”

Delegate Samuel Nash, a Gallia County lawyer, Curtin notes, followed: “Every citizen has, and will have a right to participate in the means of education; but the intention of the provision merely is, that no organized body of Christians, as such, shall be entitled to lay its hands upon the school funds of the state and appropriate it to the furtherance of their own particular views…It means merely that neither Presbyterian, the Episcopalian, or the Catholic church shall have the power to seize upon the public funds and appropriate them to suit itself.”

Now wouldn’t these ideas be reassuring to originalists like former U.S. Supreme Justice Antonin Scalia?

Please read Curtin’s complete article.

And ask yourself, is your school district part of our historic lawsuit? Check here.

If not, why not? Learn more here.

Sincerely,

Vouchers Hurt Ohio