In a case currently before the Supreme Court, a Lutheran church is fighting Missouri’s decision not to allow it to benefit from a statewide program in which public funds are used to resurface playgrounds. Nathan Diament explains the case’s implications:

The legal basis of the denial is the Missouri state constitution’s “Blaine Amendment,” which states: “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or creed of religion” and no government entity “shall ever make an appropriation or pay from any public fund . . . anything in aid of any . . . church.” . . .

This provision . . . carries a pernicious pedigree. The great wave of Catholic immigration to America in the 1800s gave rise to strong anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic sentiment. In 1875, Senator James Blaine of Maine proposed an amendment to the federal constitution using the above-quoted text. The senator’s goal was to deny Catholic schools the kind of government funding that “common schools” (which were essentially Protestant) were receiving.

The amendment failed to garner a two-thirds vote in the Senate, but . . . the anti-Catholic forces succeeded in having their no-aid language adopted into all but ten state constitutions. . . .

[O]ver the past 25 years, the Supreme Court’s church-state jurisprudence has shifted to hold that while the government must not favor a particular religion, or religion in general, the Constitution also does not demand that the government disfavor religion. . . . This newer, sensible jurisprudence is at odds with the anti-religious, strict-separation approach of the Blaine Amendments.

This conflict is not an academic one. The high court’s ruling in the [Missouri] case will directly impact the very safety and welfare of the Jewish community and other faith communities.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.