On the surface, it seems like 2022 was a year of conservative triumph in the courts and in schools, as US Supreme Court decisions about religion and education joined other precedent-smashing opinions about abortion rights and gun control. The school decisions seemed to fulfill long-held conservative dreams about pushing prayer back into public classrooms and diverting tax funding to explicitly religious schools.
But looking at the language of these rulings — especially Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s