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ICYMI: Democrats Target Faith-Based Child Care Centers for Destruction

Congressional Democrats insist that their so-called Build Back Better bill is “for the children.” But their reckless spending bill will push private providers out of the market, give parents less choice, and destroy the faith-based providers that many parents prefer.

In Case You Missed It via Newsweek, Democrats’ pre-k provision punishes faith-based child care providers and empowers teachers unions.

Biden’s Act of Child Care Sacrifice
By Max Eden
November 18, 2021

American parents prefer to send their kids to faith-based child care centers. But with a subtle yet significant statutory shift, Build Back Better targets these centers for destruction.


But Build Back Better's $225 billion child care plan defines federal financial aid as formal grants. This means that faith-based child care providers will be required to navigate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the Age Discrimination Act and the Head Start program's myriad non-discrimination regulations.

Child care centers newly subjected to the ADA will be pressured to undergo costly physical renovations. Secular child care centers may tap into federal facilities funding, but church-based providers may not. The law specifies, with seeming antagonism, that providers "may not use federal funds for buildings or facilities that are primarily used for sectarian instruction or religious worship." It is unclear at best whether this hostility to religious institutions is constitutional, but such is the current state of the law nonetheless.

Religious institutions may… be forced to choose between providing subsidized child care and retaining dedicated men's and women's ministries and marriage counseling programs predicated on the proposition that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.

Churches, synagogues and mosques that still opt to provide subsidized child care thus may be forced to sacrifice the religious character of their programs.

The only institutions with the bureaucratic and legal capacity to readily comply with the slew of federal regulations are the ones that are already doing so: traditional public schools. Build Back Better will destroy church-based child care and swell public school enrollment, which in turn will expand the membership and power of the Democrats' most powerful special interest group: teachers' unions. And that's probably the point.

Read the full oped here.

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