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A coalition of organizations has announced the launch of a groundbreaking new database: the Religious Discrimination Tracker. Despite significant strides in religious freedom jurisprudence over the last decade, many federal and state statutes and regulations have yet to comply with Supreme Court rulings or face litigation challenges. To combat this, the EPIC Coalition (a multi-faith coalition that focuses on education), Teach Coalition, the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic, and the Notre Dame Educational Law Project worked together to create the Religious Discrimination Tracker as a tool to help researchers quickly identify ways to ensure equal access to funding, particularly in education.
The tracker collates data on statutes and regulations from across the country and categorizes them by their respective public policy sector. The site also has an interactive map that allows for navigation to each law in question, providing a short summary of it and a link to its text. So far, the organizations have identified 389 statutes or regulations that discriminate in funding over 4 million American students in over 25,000 schools. Over the coming weeks and months, the sponsors will continue to update the tracker in light of new research and any repeals of discriminatory laws currently in force.
