Sherif Girgis on the possible vouchers analogy

Supplementally to the essay Sherif Girgis and I did for Public Discourse responding to Bob Hockett's thoughtful questions about how we ought to be analyzing the HHS mandate from the moral point of view, Sherif has offered a comment on the possible analogy with indirect governmental support for religiously-affiliated schools though voucher programs:

Grant that, as [Robert George] and I in our Public Discourse piece agreed with Prof. Hockett, there is a formal parallel between (a) the government's support of Catholic education through vouchers, and (b) the Church's (forced) support of contraception under the mandate. And suppose that the (forced) cooperation in the second case is unjustified cooperation with immorality, given the Church's views about contraception and abortion.

From these points, all we can infer from the government's willingness to subsidize parochial schools is that the the State doesn't think it immoral to be a Catholic, or teach children Catholic doctrine. But the kind of governmental "endorsement" of Catholicism banned by the First Amendment is not that. What the First Amendment forbids is for the government to endorse Catholic teaching as true, or otherwise favor Catholicism (in theory or practice) over other religions.

In other words, I think the worry that if you oppose the mandate, you should oppose school vouchers, rests on an equivocation on the term "support" between these statements:

--Out of respect for religious freedom, the Church shouldn't be made to support abortion and contraception.

--Out of respect for non-establishment, the government shouldn't support Catholic teaching by subsidizing Catholic education.