Blaine Amendment

The measures were designed to deny government aid to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Catholic Church in locations with large immigrant populations.

[1] They emerged from a growing consensus among 19th-century U.S. Protestants that public education must be free from "sectarian' or "denominational' control, while it also reflected nativist tendencies hostile to immigrants.

Blaine, who actively sought Catholic votes when he ran for president in 1884, believed that possibility of hurtful agitation on the school question should be ended.

Eventually, all but 12 states (Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, and West Virginia) passed laws that meet the general criteria for designation as "Blaine amendments", in that they ban the use of public funds to support sectarian private schools.

[10] Voters have also rejected proposals to repeal their state-level Blaine amendments in New York (1967), Michigan (1970), Oregon (1972), Washington state (1975), Alaska (1976), Massachusetts (1986), and Oklahoma (2016).

[14] Louisiana's current 1974 constitution replaced it with a copy of the federal First Amendment's no-establishment and free exercise clauses, in Article 1, Sec.