This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 26, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

So-called Blane amendments were created to keep states from sending public funds to support typically Catholic education.

And today those laws foil many efforts at giving parents more choice in education.

Following the premiere of the Cato Institute film Live Free and Learn,

scholarship tax credits in New Hampshire, Dick Comer, a senior attorney at the

Institute for Justice, described the history and trouble with Blaine amendments.

So you've got 38 states with Blaine amendments that basically say no money shall be

appropriated to the benefit of sectarian schools. That's the classic Blaine amendment.

And these emerged out of sort of anti-Catholic bias in 19th century, is that right?

That's correct.

I mean, as the country became more religiously diverse

and the monopoly of the Protestant majority

over the public schools was challenged by the Catholics.

The Catholics started setting up their own schools because the public schools as generically

Protestant institutions were inhospitable to Catholic immigrant children.

It actually was an effort to proselytize the Catholic kids and turn them into good Protestants.

So the Catholics set up their own schools and started demanding that the public school

funds be split between the Protestant public schools and the Catholic parochial schools.

And in fact, this was very much the case in New Hampshire

where the Catholic immigrants were coming from Quebec and from Ireland.

Both jurisdictions did in fact divide the school funds between Protestant and Catholic schools and

...