Two days ago, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Christian Nationalist superintendent of public instruction, announced that the state government of Oklahoma is going to go ahead with plans to create the St. Isidore of Sienna Catholic Virtual School despite Oklahoma Supreme Court orders not to do so.

Oklahoma state law HB1775 prohibits any books or other educational materials that might cause a student to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” about their ethnic or gender identity. In practice, this law was used to ban books that teach about racism or non-heterosexual identities.

For example, books teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 when 6,000 African-American residents of Tulsa were imprisoned and somewhere between 75 and 300 of them were killed, and 10,000 of them kicked out of their own homes, would be removed from classrooms under this law. In another example, the book Gender Queer, a memoir of a teenager contemplating their gender identity, is banned.

Ryan Walters, who has no legal education or training, says that the judges don’t understand the Constitution. Ryan Walters is, in fact, being purposefully dishonest about the requirements of the Constitution in government-established and government-funded schools. There are two Constitutions in question, the Constitution of the United States of America, and the state Constitution of Oklahoma.

The Constitution of the USA sets this standard: There can be no government establishment of religion. That includes, under the First and Fourteenth Amendment, a prohibition on government-established and government-funded religious schools. The St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was established by the government and funded by the government. It was therefore plain and simple.

This government religious school was also unconstitutional by the standard of the Constitution of the state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma Constitution. Article 2, Section 5 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."

Is that so hard to understand?