Private religious schools that receive public funds must follow state laws that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation or religion, a federal court ruled last week. The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston came after two schools — Saint Dominic Academy in Auburn and Bangor Christian Schools, run by Crosspoint Church — asked for exemptions from the Maine Human Rights Act so they wouldn’t be required to enforce policies that contradicted their religious beliefs, such as admitting students who were openly gay or transgender, for instance, or requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns.The appeals court largely upheld a lower court’s decision denying this exemption, but it differed in its opinion of the state’s rules around religious expression and asked that the lower court reconsider how that provision applies to religious schools.
Maine has long allowed students who live in towns that do not have public schools at their grade level to attend approved private schools at the state’s expense, requiring the towns to pay a student’s tuition up to a certain amount. Religious schools were excluded from this town tuitioning program from 1981 until 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that limiting the program to nonsectarian schools violated the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections.While the case was making its way through the courts, the state Legislature amended the Maine Human Rights Act to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and religion in education. It also clarified that an exemption allowing religious schools to discriminate based on sexual orientation only applied to those that weren’t receiving public funds.
