Wells Fargo and Fifth Third announced this week they will no longer donate to
help poor, minority children attend better Christian schools, because the
banks’ leaders think Christian teachings about sex are bigoted. Last year, the
two corporations donated $5.4 million to Florida’s tax-credit scholarship
program, which assists more than 100,000 children, approximately 70 percent of whom are black, Hispanic, and
multiracial.
“All of us at Wells Fargo
highly value diversity and inclusion, and we oppose discrimination of any
kind,” said a spokeswoman.
Fifty-eight
percent of the children who participated in this program in 2015-16 had single mothers. Their average family income was
$25,550, near the federal poverty line. Researchers found that “on average, students who choose
the scholarship were struggling academically in their prior public school,” and
that these struggling children bump up their achievement to match that of
richer kids with better schools within several years of joining the program.
The banks ended their support
for the poor minority children after a harassment campaign by the Orlando
Sentinel. The newspaper went after Christian schools in articles accusing
them of hating LGBT people due to religious teachings about sex that are shared
by the majority of the world’s faithful, including Muslims and Jews. Then the
newspaper contacted major donors to the scholarships, including Fifth Third and
Wells Fargo, to pressure them into recanting. It worked.
“After the
[Orlando Sentinel] story ran, Fifth Third changed its mind,” the Orlando Sentinel article on the banks’ withdrawal
from the donations says. The banks now say they will not participate in the
program until state lawmakers discriminate against religious schools that
uphold their faiths’ historic sexual ethics.
The Sentinel reviewed documents of more than
1,000 private religious schools that take state scholarships and found 156 have
policies that say gay and transgender students can be denied enrollment or
expelled or that explain the school opposes their sexual orientation or gender
identity on religious grounds.
Those campuses served more than 16 percent of
the students who received tax credit scholarships during the 2018-2019 school
year, records from [scholarship organization] Step Up For Students and the
Florida Department of Education show.
Since the
Sentinel first reported on the issue last summer, four other companies,
including Central Florida-based Rosen Hotels & Resorts, Inc., have
withdrawn support.
The attempt to manipulate the private sector to accomplish what
the state legislature has repeatedly rebuffed has, however, at least partly
backfired. In the middle of this brouhaha, the state’s largest scholarship
organization announced a new $35 million donation from Breakthru Beverage
Florida, a large beverage distributor.
By law, the
scholarship donation pool automatically expands if donations exceed 90
percent of the cap in a given year, and it has frequently hit that ceiling
since its inception 19 years ago. The current cap is $559.1 million, a tiny
fraction of the state’s annual $28 billion expenditure on K-12.
“Private schools that won’t
admit or would discipline gay students harm LGBTQ youngsters who might be
enrolled and others who absorb those bigoted messages,” the Orlando Sentinel
paraphrased from comments by Florida state Rep. Carlos Smith. Smith’s
complaining on Twitter helped get the newspaper to “investigate” poor minority
Christian children receiving a better education than in their former public
schools. “It’s poisoning kids minds,” Smith told the Sentinel. “We should not
be funding these schools.”
Meanwhile, publicly
funded venues across Florida, including state universities, host
Drag Queen Story Hour, and numerous public schools across the state,
including public universities, teach students that it’s possible to change
one’s sex from female to male or vice versa. One school district even threatened a male gym teacher for refusing
to watch a female student in the locker room, a
situation that is still unresolved.
Can religious and
science-minded taxpayers halt their contributions to these organizations that
discriminate against their viewpoints and promote hatred of their values? Are
the poor black and brown parents fleeing to Christian schools participating in
their “bigotry”? Or does “tolerance” and “diversity” only ratchet in one
direction?
Joy Pullmann
is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of five
children. Newly out: the second edition of
her ebook recommending more than 400 classic books for young children. She is
also the author of "The Education Invasion: How
Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from
Encounter Books. She identifies as native American and gender natural. Find her
on Twitter @JoyPullmann.
