Iowa’s School Voucher Program challenged in federal court

Written May 14, 2025  by Sondra Wilson.

On January 24, 2023 Governor Reynolds signed House File 68 (aka “School Voucher Program”) into law, which now shovels $345 million tax dollars per year into private schools (Gruber-Miller & Akin 2023). 84 percent of Iowa’s private schools are religiously affiliated: 55% identify as Catholic, 20% as Christian and 11% as Lutheran. There is one Islamic school (Meyer 2023).

The principle of separation of church and state in the US, enshrined in the First Amendment, generally prohibits government funding of religious activities and prevents the government from endorsing or establishing a religion. This means tax dollars cannot be used to directly support religious institutions or activities, like schools or charitable organizations, even if those organizations also provide secular services.

The Curse of Ham was used to justify slavery;
The Fable of Sodom & Gomorrah is used to justify anti-LGBT+ bigotry

This handbook, designed to help religious schools who indoctrinate children into forming anti-LGBT+ beliefs, is circulated to religious schools. 

Genesis 9:18–29, sometimes referred to as the curse of Ham, is one of the most cryptic stories in the Old Testament. Subject to a multitude of interpretations, this passage has been widely deployed as the biblical basis for race-based chattel slavery. In the story, Noah gets drunk and falls asleep naked in his tent. His son Ham walks in on his sleeping father and sees his father naked. Ham leaves to tell his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, yet they respond differently. Instead of gazing upon their father’s unclothed body, they quickly grab a blanket and walk backwards into his tent to cover him. When Noah wakes up and discovers what Ham has done, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan.Conversely, Noah blesses his other sons and consigns Canaan to serve them:

Noah concludes with a final pronouncement: “May Canaan be the slave of Japheth” (9:27). Proslavery advocates used these verses to make a biblical case that black people—as descendants of Ham—belonged in a state of slavery.

For some, Ham’s transgression provided an understanding of the origin of slavery and where it fit in the Bible’s grand narrative. “It was in consequence of sin . . . that the first slave sentence of which we have any record was pronounced by Noah upon Canaan and his descendants,” wrote Presbyterian minister George D. Armstrong.⁵ Proslavery theologians taught that slavery had been a regrettable but necessary reality ever since Ham’s transgression.

This passage from Genesis not only provided a basis for slavery’s existence, but it was an indication for some that God decreed a specific race of people to be cursed and live their days in bondage. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America, remarked in his well-known “Cornerstone Speech” that “the negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”⁶

And Dabney tentatively advanced a claim that many white Christians held as incontrovertible truth: “It may be that we should find little difficulty in tracing the lineage of the present Africans to Ham.”⁷ A racial genealogy underlies the racist interpretation of Canaan’s curse. It assumed that the progeny of Shem became the Jewish people, the descendants of Japheth became white people, and these two were the rightful masters of those descended from Ham, the “degraded” black race. In one stroke of dubious demography, slavery became the right and proper place of Africans specifically and exclusively.

Abolitionists advanced several arguments to refute the curse of Ham as justification for the enslavement of black people. First, they pointed out that Noah pronounced the curse on Canaan, not Ham. Canaan’s curse had been fulfilled, they said, when Israel conquered the Canaanite lands. Thus, there was no perpetual curse that still applied in the nineteenth century. Abolitionists also questioned whether black Africans were the genealogical descendants of Ham at all. And how could white people definitively trace their lineage to that of Shem or Japheth?

One abolitionist challenged proslavery advocates by asking, “Where is the sentence [of Scripture] in which God ever appointed you, the Anglo-Saxon race [over another people], you, the mixture of all races under heaven, you, who can not tell whether the blood of Sem, Ham, or Japheth mingles in your veins”?⁸

One of the best biblical cases against American slavery was not to deny that faithful people in the Bible enslaved others but to demonstrate how that form of slavery—the slavery of the ancient Near East—was far different from the slavery practiced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the American South. It was impossible to deny that some form of unpaid labor had characterized the economy of virtually every society for thousands of years. Yet enslaved people in these contexts had endured a different type of bondage. In most cases, they could legally marry and own property, and they worked for a specific term, not a lifetime. Slaves in other cultures were not born into servitude. They might offer their labor in order to pay off a debt, or they were captured in war. Slavery was not exclusively a matter of race or ethnicity in other cultures either. Of course, the point of this was not to suggest that slavery was a favorable way to live. Rather, this argument was used to demonstrate that southern theologians gave virtually no consideration to the unique form of slavery that existed in America.

So, unfortunately, the most potent biblical antislavery argument—demonstrating the differences between slavery in the ancient Near East and that of the American South—also took the most effort to understand. Attempting to list the differences between slavery as practiced in the Bible and race-based chattel slavery required an in-depth grasp of cultures thousands of years removed from the mid-1800s.

The argument required a rather sophisticated knowledge of the differences between Old Testament Israel and the New Testament people of God. For most Christians, even those sympathetic to the plight of black people, the southern proslavery advocates seemed to have a clearer and simpler biblical argument, one that did not require sources outside of Scripture or employ unfamiliar interpretations.

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.“

– Thomas Jefferson

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.” 

– James Madison

References

Gruber-Miller, Stephen, and Katie Akin. “Jubilant Kim Reynolds Signs Iowa’s Seismic ‘school Choice’ Bill into Law. What It Means:” The Des Moines Register, Des Moines Register, 25 Jan. 2023, www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2023/01/24/iowa-governor-kim-reynolds-signs-school-choice-scholarships-education-bill-into-law/69833074007/. 

Meyer, Virginia. “School Funding Plan Compels Government Support of Religion.” Log In, 19 Jan. 2023, www.thegazette.com/letters-to-the-editor/school-funding-plan-compels-government-support-of-religion/.

Rooker, Amanda. (August 22, 2022). Report card on Iowa schools: Data shows how Iowa compares to other states. KCCI Des Moines 8. https://www.kcci.com/article/report-card-on-iowa-schools-data-shows-how-iowa-compares-to-other-states/40961606.