Senator Clinton was caught out on Tuesday by an alert reporter for Newsday, Glenn Thrush, who captured the former first lady making a truly silly argument against school vouchers. “First family that comes and says ‘I want to send my daughter to St. Peter’s Roman Catholic School’ and you say ‘Great, wonderful school, here’s your voucher,'” Mrs. Clinton said, according to the Long Island newspaper. “Next parent that comes and says, ‘I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist …’ The parent says, ‘The way that I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. …You gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, under the Constitution, you can’t discriminate against me.'” The senator added, “So what if the next parent comes and says, ‘I want to send my child to the School of the Jihad?’ … I won’t stand for it.”

By this reasoning, Mrs. Clinton should oppose the First Amendment. Why allow religious freedom at all if people can start a jihadist mosque or a racist church? The country already has laws outlawing terrorist violence and violence motivated by racial hatred. Conspiracy laws may be invoked against those planning such crimes. That’s the way we deal with racial and religious violent hatred in America, not by dispensing with free speech or freedom of religion to begin with.The argument can be made that the First Amendment is different from school vouchers because it involves private action rather than state funded action.The flaw in that argument is that it assumes the money belongs to the state rather than to the taxpayer from whom it was originally collected. It’s a flaw that’s apparently invisible to Democrats such as Mrs. Clinton.

As it happens, school voucher laws have existed for decades in America, often in small towns, such as parts of Maine and Vermont. And they already exist now in dozens of more diverse jurisdictions, from Milwaukee to Cleveland to Washington, D.C., where Mrs. Clinton opted to send her own daughter to private school. Most of them are used to help poor children get better educations than they would have gotten in the government run schools. That Mrs. Clinton thinks racist or violently Islamist schools would be a big problem under a school voucher system only underscores what a low regard she has for parents. How many of them out there does she think would actually send their children to such schools?

The fact that Mrs. Clinton had to make such arguments at all is a sign of the progress that Governor Pataki, even while hospitalized, is making in changing the education debate in New York State. Mr. Pataki has proposed a mere $500 a child tax credit that could be used by low-income families toward private or parochial education. The idea won support from Edward Cardinal Egan, from Bishop DiMarzio of Brooklyn, and from some Jewish leaders at a rally in Albany on February 14. This modest initiative has the biggest gun in the Democratic party playing defense, resorting to scare tactics in an effort to convince parents in the South Bronx that Mr. Pataki’s initiative to help rescue their children from failing government schools is actually an opportunity for white supremacists and terrorists. Here’s hoping that when Mr. Pataki gets out of the hospital, his first move is to seize the advantage he has on this issue and press it.