This is a huge ruling where nondiscrimination is concerned:
An ideologically split Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law school can legally deny recognition to a Christian student group that won’t let gays join, with one justice saying that the First Amendment does not require a public university to validate or support the group’s “discriminatory practices.”
The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society, which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and regards “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle” as being inconsistent with that faith.
But Hastings, which is in San Francisco, said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.
The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group’s First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college’s nondiscrimination policy.
Note the important factor here is that the group in question wanted to have it both ways: to be sponsored/funded by the university, yet discriminate against an entire class of people. The Religious Right will, as they commence moaning about “activist judges,” gloss over this fact, but the Christian group wasn’t hurt in any way. They simply have to play by the rules of any other organization on campus, which, to them, is sometimes the greatest offense of all.
(h/t Joe Sudbay)
They can still have their little bigot club of fake “Christians”, it just wont be funded by money from glbt students, and the religious right is still pissing and moaning about their religious ‘freedom’ being violated. When you’re taking money from others, of course there are limits on your ‘freedom’. They just dont get it.
When I was in college we started a gay students union (1977) but didnt get a dime from the school. We met in the roman catholic chaplin’s house who was a big w***e perv who hit on just about every guy in the group. Yes he tried with me and no he wasnt successful. I thought he was gross.
He was into college guys? I bet the other priests teased him about his taste in older men.
[...] weighing in on the recent Supreme Court decision of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, where the court simply held that a Christian group at Hastings College of the Law has to abide by the same nondiscrimination [...]