Have you ever heard of ALEC? 🤔🤨
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-backed lobbying network that writes ready-made bills for state lawmakers—almost always advancing a conservative, pro-privatization, and often religious-right agenda. ‼️
Operating behind closed doors, ALEC pairs legislators with industry and ideological groups to draft “model” laws that strip local control, funnel public resources to private or religious entities, and weaken public institutions. 🏛️
For SEA, ALEC is not just a think tank—it’s a pipeline delivering pre-packaged legislation, like the Released Time Education Act, to fast-track the erosion of secular, inclusive public education across the country.
🚨What’s ALEC’s Released Time Education Act?! 🚨
The ALEC “Released Time Education Act” is a national playbook for embedding religious released-time programs—like LifeWise—into public schools and protecting them with legal muscle.💪
1. No local choice
Forces every school district to adopt a released-time policy, even if the community overwhelmingly supports keeping religion out of school hours.
2. Religious class = school credit
Requires schools to award academic credit for religious classes under “neutral, secular criteria,” giving devotional instruction the same status as legitimate coursework.
3. Funding & attendance
Students are counted as present, so public dollars still flow while they attend religious classes off campus.
4. Social pressure baked in
Non-participants are often stuck in non-credit “busy work,” making the religious option the fun, social one.
5. The “equal access” Trojan horse
Section (D) guarantees released-time programs the same funds, benefits, and services schools give any community group. That means if your district offers free rooms, bulletin boards, PA announcements, bus use, or other perks to groups like the Scouts, sports leagues, or arts programs, it must also give them to religious released-time programs.
Courts in Mergens, Good News Club, and Rosenberger have already blessed this as “equal access,” not “funding,” even though it clearly consumes taxpayer resources. This bakes the loophole into state law and makes it nearly impossible for districts to keep religion at arm’s length.
6. Weaponized enforcement
😳Adds a private right of action so districts can be sued, fined, and forced into compliance.
Bottom line: ALEC lifted the most aggressive policies from Ohio, Indiana, and South Carolina—each of which is derived from LifeWise’s model policy—added a litigation threat, and slipped in an “equal access” clause that quietly hands religious programs taxpayer funds. It’s all built on what LifeWise laid out with the help of First Liberty and WallBuilders—
🚨The goal is clear—make released-time religion a permanent, normalized part of the public school day, everywhere.
What people are saying:
- Secular Education Association: Secular Education Association
- Facebook User: Yep
- Facebook User: It’s not good. I use sourcewatch to see affiliations with ALEC.
- Facebook User: The class is an elective.. the parents have to request it. The classes claiming evolution is fact, homosexuality is ok, killing babies in the womb should be a right.. those we can’t opt out of. “Secular Education Association” by definition says you want to teach against the ways of God. The Bible speaks of you extensively, those who would call evil good, and good evil. What have you to offer these souls you’ve been trusted with? How will they defeat death… how will you? We strive to learn from the only man to defeat it and come back to save the rest of us. I hope you’ll consider your own condition. You can’t save yourselves.
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