Tennessee religious liberty law allows publicly funded adoption agencies to ban Jewish parents

[pbrower2a]

Of course it should be an option to want to place a kid in a Christian home.  It's disingenuous to say that this is about Jewish parents in particular, when the same interest would apply to any non-Christian home.  It doesn't matter if it's a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or secular home.

The question is whether the government should be funding agencies who discriminate on the basis of religion. I’m sure some Americans feel as you do, but it raises some constitutional issues.

A challenge is that the free exercise of some religions (such as evangelical Christianity) requires evangelism of those who don't share that religion.  If you believe that every non-Christian is going to Hell,  then intentionally putting a child in an environment where he or she would not be raised Christian is risking eternal damnation for that child.  I'd argue that doing this is part of the free exercise of religion for the adoption organization.

I think that we can all leave the threat of eternal damnation to those  egregious sinners who have done horrific sin -- literally crime, It would be terribly unjust for God to condemn people to Hell after being gassed for being Jews while Nazis who have a death-bed atonement get to heaven on cheap grace after having participated in "selections" or having loosed vicious dogs upon helpless prisoners. . .    

[pbrower2a]

Show me where in the 1st Amendment it says that there is "separation of church and state".  It only protects religion from the government, not the government from religion.

Same energy as "we're not a democracy, we're a republic".

True. There is no question in the practical meaning of the word republic, the word now simply means that there is no monarch even if a figurehead. Example: Pinochet's Chile was a republic in that sense. Apartheid-era South Africa was a republic. Iran is a republic. All Commie states were  or are republics.

So if the cost of maintaining a liberal society should be the maintenance of a constitutional monarch, then I will put up with the constitutional monarch.  Plenty of tyrants have cheapened the meaning of the word republic to include some  regimes that rival that of Ivan the Terrible for sheer horror.