Last month, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against the creation of what would have been America’s first religious charter school. The school’s Catholic founders had hoped that recent federal Supreme Court rulings would help their case. Michael A. Helfand explains the underlying question:

Charter schools come in all shapes and sizes, varying in their structure and definition across jurisdictions. But typically, they are privately operated public schools. So, can they be religious? Answering the question has become a bit of a constitutional Rorschach test: should we view prohibiting religious charter schools as prohibiting discrimination against the private religious entities seeking to operate them? Or should we view allowing religious charter schools as pushing even the new, more limited demands of church-state separation too far by allowing public schools to be religious?

Sorting through these constitutional issues, Helfand explains, doesn’t merely involve interpretation of the First Amendment, but also what jurists call the “state-action doctrine,” which one legal scholar has termed a “conceptual disaster area.” Ultimately, he concludes, only a Supreme Court decision can settle these issues—and there’s no telling how the court might rule.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].