Article II, Section 5 of the Oklahoma Constitution has long been known as a “Blaine amendment” because its language is modeled after a proposed U.S. constitutional amendment proposed in 1875 by U.S. Rep. James G. Blaine, who sought to prohibit taxpayer funding of private Catholic schools while maintaining government funding of public schools that incorporated Protestant Christian teachings into daily lessons.

Blaine’s proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution failed, but in subsequent years, many states adopted some version of his proposal into their state constitutions, including Oklahoma.

But when former state Rep. Jon Echols, a Republican candidate for state attorney general this year, recently pointed out the history of Oklahoma’s constitutional provision, he faced backlash from entities trying to rewrite history.

During a May debate, Echols told attendees that Blaine “was an anti-Catholic bigot in Congress, and that’s where we took it from. The Blaine Amendment is a stain on the Oklahoma Constitution.”

The Frontier, an online site, issued an editorial proclaiming that Echols’ statement was “mostly false” and insisted that section of the Oklahoma Constitution “is not based on a so-called ‘Blaine Amendment’” because three Democratic appointees to the Oklahoma Supreme Court quibbled in 2015 with the origin of Oklahoma’s constitutional language. One justice insisted that Oklahoma’s provision was based on the 1830 constitution of the state of Virginia, which Thomas Jefferson helped draft.

However, the language of the Oklahoma Constitution has little in common with the Jefferson language, but it does have notable parallels with the original Blaine amendment.

The 1830 constitution of the state of Virginia declared, “Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

The original Blaine amendment stated, “No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State, for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised, or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.”

The Oklahoma Constitution states, “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.”

Echols said the parallels between the Oklahoma Constitution and the Blaine amendment, which include the use of the word “sect” (code for “Catholic” in those years), make it obvious which document was the source for Oklahoma’s language.

“With all due respect to the justices, the citizens can read them both with their own eyes,” Echols said. “It’s clearly a Blaine amendment, and we should stop pretending like it’s not because we’re embarrassed of the bigoted history of Congressman Blaine.”

Rusty Brown, director of special projects for the Freedom Foundation, which has focused on state Blaine amendments, said those denying the origins of Blaine amendments may do so because those amendments are often used to attack school-choice programs.

 “I think they’re just kind of throwing out anything and everything that they can to complicate this process,” Brown said.

That attack was tried in Oklahoma when school-choice opponents cited Oklahoma’s Blaine amendment to justify overturning the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarships for Students with Disabilities (LNH) program. The LNH program provides state tax dollars to parents to send Oklahoma children with special needs, such as autism, to private schools.

However, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a unanimous 2016 decision, held the Henry scholarship program was constitutional and specifically noted the program does not directly benefit private schools or churches, but individual students.

“When the parents and not the government are the ones determining which private school offers the best learning environment for their child, the circuit between government and religion is broken,” the justices stated (emphasis in original).

However, state Blaine amendments have long been a tool used by racists and bigots to target religious private schools, particularly those serving minorities, in states across the country.

Writing in National Review in 2020, Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of the Conscience Project, and Ashley E. McGuire, senior fellow with The Catholic Association, noted that 37 states have Blaine amendments.

Following the Civil War, Picciotti-Bayer and McGuire noted that some southern states adopted Blaine amendments as part of a strategy to make it difficult for the children of former slaves to access quality schools.

During those years, Picciotti-Bayer and McGuire noted that “some Southern states were compelled to provide public funds for the education of the children of former slaves as a condition of re-entering the Union. Blaine amendments provided a means for ensuring that black families would be unable to access public funds to send their children to Christian denominational schools started after the Civil War.”

As officials with the Ku Klux Klan “realized that Blaine amendments were an effective way to marginalize not just Catholics but also blacks and Jews,” Picciotti-Bayer and McGuire noted that the Klan became one of the principal backers of state Blaine amendments.

An amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 by the Georgia Goal Scholarship Program also noted that state Blaine amendments were used to prevent black students from attending private schools.

From 1865 to 1900, the brief noted that black religious leaders promoted classical liberal education for their youth, but states that adopted Blaine amendments “barred public aid for the Classical Liberal Education of blacks in denominational schools.”

That was done even though those same states had previously funded private-school education for white children.

“Beginning in 1792 and leading up to the Civil War, a significant portion of what little state aid Georgia had provided for the K-12 education of white children had been distributed to county-based, private academies or ‘seminaries,’ in which Christian religious education occurred,” the Georgia Goal Scholarship Program noted.

After 1877, the Democratic-controlled Georgia Legislature funded only public schools and used a Blaine amendment to bar state funding of private-school education.

“Thus, once Georgia lawmakers decided it was necessary to provide a limited K-12 education to black, as well as white, children, they developed a newfound concern over the ‘separation of church and state’ and decided to end their 85-year practice of financially supporting private Christian education,” the Georgia Goal Scholarship Program brief stated. “In this way, they avoided any need to fund private K-12 schools created by African American religious leaders.”

Yet, at the same time, as “the proponents of the ‘No-Aid’ constitutional amendment movement made clear, No-Aid provisions would not interfere with publicly-funded common schools in the South teaching the ‘common’ elements of ‘non-sectarian’ Christianity and lessons in Christian morality that, in the nineteenth century, were viewed as an indispensable part of a basic education for democratic participation,” the brief stated.

Thanks to Blaine amendments, officials with the Georgia Goal Scholarship Program wrote that “religious bigotry was conjoined with racial bigotry in public school funding to trap black children in intentionally separate and grossly inadequate public schools.”