Attorney General Eliot Spitzer deserves some credit for trying his best to find a way to get private schools — including parochial schools –— in New York State a share of state funding for education. He has just released a report concluding that there are significant areas in which the state can enhance the education received by students who attend non-public schools, including religious schools. Our Rachel Kovner had the particulars yesterday on page one of The New York Sun. But for all the credit Mr. Spitzer deserves, the fact is that the opinion elites in New York have failed to step up to the law that is the reason he has had to use such ingenuity in the first place.

We speak of the Blaine Amendment to the New York State constitution. It was passed in 1894, and it says that neither New York State nor any subdivision thereof shall use its property or credit or any public money — or even authorize or permit these to be used, directly or indirectly — in aid or maintenance, other than for examination or inspection, of any school or institution of learning wholly or in part under the control or direction of any religious denomination. It went on to include any school in which “any denominational tenet or doctrine is taught.” It was eventually changed to permit public funding for transportation to and from school.

The thing that needs to be said about the Blaine amendment is that it is a monument to old fashioned anti-Catholic bigotry. It was named after a Speaker of the House of Representatives in the years after the Civil War, James G. Blaine, a Republican Congressman from Maine known as the Plumed Knight. His story is not uncomplicated. When President Grant bowed to nativist pressure and introduced a bill to amend the American Constitution to block aid to religious schools, Blaine became his point man in the Congress, partly, perhaps, to protect his own career against agitation by bigots, for he was the son of a Catholic mother and the father of pupils at parochial school, but certainly because he aspired to higher office (he eventually ran for president on a platform against “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion”).

At the federal level, Blaine’s amendment failed (in the Senate after passing the House).* In subsequent years, its bigoted purpose was etched into the constitutions of more than half the states. And New York State was one of those that fell for a version of the bait. Efforts have been made to repeal the Blaine amendment in New York; there was a spirited fight in 1967. But the Blaine Amendment survives in Albany. The sad fact is that legitimate defenders of public education and opponents of vouchers — and some that are not so legitimate — have been hiding behind the skirts of Blaine for years.

So as we watch Mr. Spitzer try to find a way around Blaine, we can’t help thinking that what is needed is a forthright public discussion of the animus behind this chapter in the history of New York State. As recently as this year, the New York Times’s editorialists were quoting opponents of a voucher program in Ohio as charging that the driving force behind the program was what the Times called “the city’s powerful Roman Catholic archdiocese.” Yet we have the sense that more and more New Yorkers are starting to move beyond such a narrow view.

They understand that whether they are Catholic, Jewish, or followers of other religions, parents who want to send their children to religious schools have the same right to tax relief or to certain publicly funded resources as those who want to send their children to non-religious schools. The far better way to go about it would be to take an unblinkered look at Blaine and remove, either by the amendment process or by a federal lawsuit against Blaine on constitutional grounds, the mark of bigotry from the laws of the Empire State. It would then be easier for reformers to open the way for New Yorkers to get the educations they want and deserve.

* “Blaine,” one scholar, Joseph Viteritti, has written in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, “would live in perpetuity as a symbol of the irony and hypocrisy that characterized much future debate: employing constitutional language, invoking patriotic images, and repeatedly appealing to individual rights as a distraction from the real business at hand — undermining the viability of schools run by religious minorities.”