In its recent session, the Supreme Court issued two decisions hailed widely by religious-liberty advocates: one upholds parents’ rights to use school vouchers to send their children to religious schools; the other limits the government’s ability to interfere with religious schools’ hiring and firing decisions. In the view of some liberal commentators, there is an inherent contradiction between protecting religious institutions from government interference and requiring that they be eligible for public funds. Not so, argues Dan McLaughlin:

It is not enough simply to tell religious believers that they can participate in the government-funded sector in a non-religious way, and then just practice their faith on their own time. That’s just not how faith works. To the believer, the free exercise of religion is a pervasive thing—an identity, not just an idea. Being a follower of Christ, or a Muslim, is not something you can take on and off like a hat. Being put to the choice will frequently compel believers to turn down benefits available to everyone else. It is no answer to tell religious schools that they can be religious, but not too religious.

As the government has grown and grown, it has become ever more difficult to maintain the fiction that the public, government-funded sector is the exception rather than the rule. The law has never actually required a “wall of separation” between church and state, and it has always been implicitly recognized that even if such a wall existed in theory, it could not be maintained in practice. Families can still pray together while walking on public streets. The fire department still comes when a church is on fire. A true wall of separation would divorce the state from its own citizens. . . . [I]f religious believers are cut out of government-funded programs in a country where the government is ubiquitous, they are effectively placed at a disadvantage compared to the non-religious.

There is, in short, no contradiction between allowing religious institutions to participate in generally applicable government programs while still being religious institutions that control how they teach and practice their own faith. Any other outcome would offend one or both of the two values protected by the religion clauses: the equal rights of religious believers to exercise their faith, or the prohibition on the government controlling how churches are taught and led.

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.