Last week dueling guest columns in the USA TODAY prompted several days of impassioned letters from readers taking sides on the issue.

It wasn’t about gay marriage or bullying or Greek austerity or anything else prominent in the news the past few days.

It was about whether it’s time to stop funding high school athletics.

Arizona is not the only state facing enormous K-12 funding pressure. During the economic downturn the past few years nearly every state either reduced education funding or held funding flat.

School districts across the country have needed to find ways to do more with less and in an increasing number of school districts one of the ways they’ve found is the elimination of high school athletics.

Perhaps it’s time for Arizona, or at least Tucson’s metro school districts, to have the same discussion.

It’s not a topic alien to most high school teachers or district governing boards. Teachers talk about it in hushed whispers in school lounges almost as if they’re Harry Potter and Hermione Granger trying not to say the name of You Know Who.

School board members will quietly talk about it with each other from time to time, though never on the dais as an item on a board agenda.

That’s because this is such a passionate issue that just broaching it in an official way will bring out the proverbial torch and pitchfork hordes who will turn board meetings into such melees that they will make the recent TUSD MAS board meeting brouhahas look like old ladies’ tea parties.

It’s hard to factor the true cost of high school athletics by peering into the byzantine depths of school district budgets. There are some line items labeled “athletics,” mostly accounting for the salaries of athletics administrators and coaching stipends. Coaching stipends and administrators alone cost TUSD $2 million a year.

But buried deep in the budget are myriad costs associated with athletics that get rolled into catchall facility, transportation and supply budgets. When you account for all the miles of athletic tape, the electricity for lights, fertilizer and lawn mowers for grass, wear and tear on buses and dozens of other costs it adds up to millions.

Athletics do generate some revenue through player fees and ticket sales but that income doesn’t even come close to covering their true cost.

Moreover, these days it’s not good enough to just have a team, you must have the best team, and since district funding just covers the basics, most coaches who want to be “the best” turn their players into beggars. They send them out to wash cars or sell cookie dough or the like to raise money to buy new high-tech gadgets and other gear to give their athletes that extra winning edge. Many schools also have large booster clubs that sell shirts and soda and nachos to raise money for the latest Nike uniforms or to fund out-of-state trips for elite teams.

High school athletics is also a billion dollar industry. Not only do schools buy all this equipment from private vendors but other companies make fortunes off of student athletes through the sale of medals, trophies, letter jackets, team photos and so on.

So a school district not only has to contend with parent and student outrage if they broach the subject of athletics elimination, but lobbying from private industry who want to make the sure the athletics gravy train stays on the tracks.

To be sure, there are some benefits to student athletics. It helps build confidence and self esteem and student athletes tend to stay in school and get passing grades because of pass-to-play rules. But other benefits, such as engendering school spirit, have faded in the modern age.

Back in the day, the entire city would turn out for a Tucson High football game. Now the stands are barely half full on Friday nights. The days of raucous pep rallies, school fight songs and huge homecoming parades are over.

Most of the interest in athletics these days has more do with college scholarships than school spirit. Yet even college recruiting has become detached from high schools, save for football. Every sport now has an “off season” club season in which elite players play other elite players. Because the competition in these club programs is so good, top players are more likely to attract college scouts to their club games than their high school games.

We Americans are sports mad and high school athletics is a more than century-old tradition and traditions are hard to break.

It’s doubtful any school board in the region will have the courage to broach this issue if presented simply as elimination.

But what might happen if districts presented the issue as a choice? Rather than a one-sided discussion – to eliminate or not eliminate – what if districts asked voters every school board election what they wanted to fund for the next two years? Give them a choice, $10 million for athletics or $10 million for math and science teachers.

If voters choose athletics, than we’ll know for certain we value it as an important part of high school education.

If voters choose education, though, it won’t be the end of athletics. Club teams and city and county recreation programs are already there to fill the void.

Austerity is here to stay so school districts must squeeze every dollar they get to properly educate our children. Does it make sense to continue to spend millions on grass, lights, buses and coaches so kids can play with a ball after school?

Perhaps high school athletics is a tradition whose cost we can no longer afford.

Proponents of Arizona’s tough immigration law, dubbed SB1070 from the number it was assigned in the state senate, believe that the expected June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the law will be the last word on its legality.

It won’t be.

Chief Justice John Roberts signaled as much at the very start of oral arguments last week when he sought an assurance from U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr that he wasn’t going to argue about racial profiling.

Verrilli responded that he wasn’t. He has since been vilified in the liberal press for not arguing so because that aspect of the law – show me your papers, please – is the part of the law that is so upsetting to most people not irrationally hysterical about illegal immigration.

The Legislature passed the law in 2010 but the Obama Administration sued, claiming the law violates the pre-emption clause of the U.S. Constitution prohibiting the states from assuming powers reserved to the federal government. Federal district and appellate courts subsequently enjoined enforcement of SB 1070’s key parts – requiring state and local law enforcement officers to enquire about the citizenship status of people they suspect in the country illegally during routine enforcement stops; making being in the country illegally a state crime; making it a crime for illegal immigrants to work in Arizona; allowing for warrantless arrests of people suspected of being in the country illegally; and making impeding traffic for the purpose of picking up an illegal immigrant a crime.

The SCOTUS punditry has been trying to read the court’s tea leaves via the types and tone of questions justices asked Verrilli and Paul Clement, the state’s lawyer, during oral argument. The consensus seems to be that some sort of tortured ruling that splits the baby is in the works, striking down parts of the law but upholding others.

And the part most of those legal experts agree will be upheld is the “papers, please” portion.

The court seemed to indicate that the federal government’s power to regulate immigration is unharmed by law enforcement officers asking about citizenship status during normal interactions with the public, especially when the federal government has been empowering numerous local law enforcement agencies to do just that for more than 20 years.

The assumption that law officers will racially profile and only ask people who look like they’re from Mexico or Central America is a weak argument for the court. Justices don’t like ruling on assumptions, they prefer facts.

In other words, a state requiring law officers to ask about citizenship if they have a reasonable suspicion to do so is constitutionally sound, but the uneven application of such a law isn’t.

Since there is no effective way to enforce the law without racially profiling, it’s likely the law will be back before the court in the future.

Which is what Roberts’ first question Wednesday indicated – this isn’t the end of debate about SB 1070, just the end of the beginning.

Prepositions matter.

While those little two, three and four-letter words might seem like English’s lesser children, they play a very important role in communication and understanding.

Take for instance the following phrases – freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

Three words each with only the middle words, both prepositions, different. Yet each phrase means distinctly different things.

For some, the first phrase, freedom of religion, is a protected right encoded in the First Amendment. It means the government cannot restrict one’s right to worship one’s god anywhere, any time and any way.

For others, the second phrase, freedom from religion, is a right encoded in the First Amendment that restricts the government from imposing, banning or requiring a particular type of religion or allowing any person or religious order to do so.

This week, the Arizona Legislature is poised to pass a bill that allows religious institutions that provide health care insurance plans for their employees to eliminate from those plans coverage for contraceptives, abortions, abortion medications (so-called morning after pills) or sterilization.

For proponents of the bill, it’s an assertion of the freedom of religion phrase – these types of medical procedures and treatments violate the tenets of some religions and it would be a violation of the First Amendment for religious organizations who have employees, such as Catholic hospitals, to be forced to fund heath care procedures that violate their religious beliefs.

For opponents of the bill, it’s violation of the freedom from religion phrase in that it gives government sanction to religious discrimination and allows a type of employer to impose its religious beliefs on its employees, which is a violation of the First Amendment.

The opponents have the better argument and Gov. Jan Brewer would be wise to veto the bill if it gets to her desk.

If proponents are right, that means our society must abandon the 236 years of religious toleration and pluralism that has allowed us to get along and prosper despite our differences. If religious discrimination is what the First Amendment allows, than any employer may choose to hire only employees who believe what they believe.

The great strength of the First Amendment is that it is both of and from – it allows any person to believe whatever they want while preventing the government from interfering with that belief and preventing those believers from imposing their beliefs on others.

House Bill 2625 allows religious groups who have decided to leave the church and enter the public marketplace as employers to impose their religious beliefs on their employees.

In fact, the bill’s own language contradicts itself because it says in several places the religious employers must follow all state and federal rules prohibiting discrimination, which includes religious discrimination.

Yet any employee or prospective employee is forced to either agree with the religious employer’s view of reproductive health care or find employment elsewhere. That’s discriminatory and a clear violation of the First and Fourteenth amendments.

This law wanders into dangerous and divisive waters and if it isn’t vetoed, the courts should immediately overturn it.