Both schools wanted to keep receiving Maine's tuition dollars — money the state sends to towns that have no public high school of their own, so families can choose a school instead — without admitting openly gay or transgender students against their convictions or requiring staff to use a student's preferred pronouns. The court said no. Schools that accept the public funds, the panel held, may not turn away students on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and may not give admissions preference to students who share the school's own faith.
The ruling was not a complete loss for the schools. The 1st Circuit found that Maine cannot force a religious school to hire staff who reject its faith commitments, and cannot dictate how religious expression looks inside the classroom. On one narrower question — a 2021 addition to the Maine Human Rights Act called the Religious Expression Rule, which bars a school from favoring its own faith's expression once it permits any religious speech at all — the court agreed the rule may violate the schools' free-expression rights and sent that piece back to the district court for further review.
Maine's tuitioning program dates to 1873, built for rural towns without a public high school of their own. State officials barred religious schools from it starting in 1980, a policy the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in its 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin, a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts holding that Maine could not exclude schools simply for being religious. Anticipating that outcome, the Maine Legislature had already amended the Human Rights Act in 2021 to require that any school taking the funds, religious or not, meet the same civil-rights standards — the very requirement now before the courts.
An old argument in new clothes
Strip away the docket number and the statute citations, and what is left is an old argument wearing new clothes: who gets to say what a human being is. The state of Maine says a birth certificate is negotiable and a school's classroom must bend to it. The schools in Auburn and Bangor say some things are not negotiable at all, and they are willing to lose money to say so.
Scripture settled this question before Maine existed as a colony, let alone a state.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27)
That verse is not a policy position. It is a fact about the universe, set down before there were courts to rule on it or legislatures to amend it. A boy is a boy and a girl is a girl because God made them so, on purpose, in His own likeness. No panel of judges, however learned, can revise that decree — they can only decide who pays for a school that still teaches it.
And that is the real cost sitting under this ruling. Saint Dominic Academy and Bangor Christian Schools now face a choice familiar to believers in every century: keep the money and bend the teaching, or keep the teaching and lose the money. The apostles faced the same fork in a Jerusalem council chamber, ordered to stop preaching a name they could not stop preaching.
"Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
No threat from that council, and no ruling from any court since, has ever managed to repeal that verse. Christian parents in Maine, and everywhere else state power leans on conviction, would do well to remember it. A school that trades its confession of Genesis 1:27 for a tuition check has not won a legal victory. It has simply found a more comfortable way to lose.
The gospel was never for sale, and it was never for rent either. Whatever a court decides about the money, the truth about who made us, and why, was settled at creation and sealed at the empty tomb. That is the one ruling no appeal will ever overturn.