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Supreme Court Stalemates 4-4 On Religious Charter School

Charlie Kirk Staff

05/22/2025

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Supreme Court Stalemates 4-4 On Religious Charter School

In what was a stunner at the Supreme Court, the Justices found themselves locked in a tie on a landmark religious freedom case, leaving the lower court’s decision intact.

The case was to decide if the state of Oklahoma could provide public funding for a Christian charter school,l but the Justices landed on a 4 – 4 tie with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, The New York Post reported.

Justice Barrett recused herself because she taught at the University of Notre Dame’s law school for around 15 years, and the school’s religious liberty clinic was representing St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which was one of the parties in the case.

The tie means that the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling, which barred public funds from being used for the school, will stay in place.

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the school’s application for funding in June 2023 in a 3 – 2 vote.

But State Attorney General Gentner Drummond sued the Board because he said the decision was illegal and would “open the floodgates and force taxpayers to fund all manner of religious indoctrination, including radical Islam or even the Church of Satan.”

During the hearing before the Supreme Court last month, the conservative justices appeared to be sympathetic to the case that the school had made.

“All the religious school is saying is, ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,’” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said.

“Our cases have made very clear — I think those are some of the most important cases we’ve had — of saying you can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second-class,” he said.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said of the school that “it’s not being denied a benefit that everyone else gets” if it did not get the funding.

“It’s being denied a benefit that no one else gets, which is the ability to establish a religious public school,” she said.

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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, a national student movement dedicated to empowering young people to promote the principles of free markets and limited government.

Charlie is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast, which regularly ranks among the top-10 news shows on Apple podcast news charts, and is the host of the nationally syndicated daily radio show on the Salem Radio Network live from 12 - 3 PM ET.
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