WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled today, 5-to-4, that public colleges and universities may require religious organizations seeking recognition or funds as campus groups to comply with anti-bias rules.
The court turned away an appeal from the Christian Legal Society(CLS), which sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California's Hastings College of the Law.
In the case of the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, Law students that identified as religious christians, wanted the financial benefits of being recognized by the Hastings College of Law at University of California.
The religious student club required members to sign a statement of faith -- one that bans practicing homosexuals and non-believers. The school demanded that student groups accept anyone who wanted to join them as a member.
"If you want state funding, public funding, and you want to use the Hastings name, then you have to abide by the Hastings policy," said Leo Martinez, acting chancellor and dean of the Hastings College of Law.
The CLS requires that voting members sign a statement of faith and alledges "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle" as being inconsistent with that faith.
But Hastings said no recognized campus groups may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.
The majority decision, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found that the law school's policy was "a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access" that did not raise First Amendment issues in the way the Christian Legal Society argued.
The opinion explicitly rejects the argument of the Christian Legal Society that a public university has no business limiting its ability to be recognized and to apply its own rules to membership. "CLS’s analytical error lies in focusing on the benefits it must forgo while ignoring the interests of those it seeks to fence out: Exclusion, after all, has two sides," the decision says. "Hastings, caught in the crossfire between a group’s desire to exclude and students´ demand for equal access, may reasonably draw a line in the sand permitting all organizations to express what they wish but no groupto discriminate in membership."
A dissent, by Justice Samuel Alito, a devout Catholic, blasted the decision, saying that it set principle of "no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning."
Joining Justice Ginsburg in the majority were Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sonia Sotomayor, John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer. Joining Justice Alito in the dissent were Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts.
The court 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 decision.
— Staff
