Campus Faith Group Takes Fight to Supreme Court

(April 18) -- The Supreme Court on Monday will take up a case that pits anti-discrimination efforts against freedom of speech, setting the stage for a ruling with the potential to affect everything from how government contracts are issued to who can join high school after-school groups.

The case, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, revolves around a student group at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law that requires its officers and voting members to be Christian and adhere to core religious principles, including those against homosexuality and sex outside of marriage.

In light of those religious requirements, in September 2004 the college barred the local chapter of the Christian Legal Society from being a registered student organization. Under Hastings' rules, official student groups -- which get to use campus facilities for meetings, college bulletin boards and e-mails for publicity and some student activity fees for expenses -- must be open to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or sexual orientation.

"The idea that the government would interfere with a religious group and tell them that they can't use their religious beliefs to choose their leadership strikes at the heart of the First Amendment," says Kim Colby, attorney for the CLS, which has chapters on some 90 law school campuses nationwide.

Colby says the CLS doesn't want to end up with atheists or people of other religions leading its Bible study. After all, anti-war groups don't pick military representatives to lead them, and environmentalist organizations get to choose people who are "green," she says. "You get to coalesce around your beliefs."

Representing Hastings, attorney Ethan Schulman of the San Francisco law firm Crowell & Moring agrees the CLS can do what it wants -- if it doesn't ask for public aid. If it wants funding for its activities and access to other school benefits, however, the group should agree to the rules against discrimination. Hastings believes "educational opportunities valuable to its students should be accessible to all its students," Schulman says.

If the high court rules in favor of the CLS, he says, all sorts of high school and college groups could be allowed to bar people from membership. And, he says, such a ruling could also imperil laws requiring companies that receive government grants to refrain from discriminating -- potentially affecting everything from companies that sell paper clips to the federal government to religious organizations that are contracted to provide social services.

Michael C. Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School who wrote a brief siding with Hastings, agrees. If the court rules that Hastings can't impose requirements such as its open-membership rule on campus groups, he says, high schools, for instance, might not be able to require that students participating in sports or other activities maintain their grade-point average.

Schulman says the Supreme Court in 1983 ruled against Bob Jones University in a related case, saying the IRS could take away the Christian school's federal tax exemption because it was discriminating against applicants who were in interracial marriages.

But Colby says the courts have looked askance at government interference with the message of religious groups, and usually examine whether an anti-discrimination rule that requires a person be allowed into a group will end up compromising that group's ability to get its message out.

And having many different groups' messages protected from interference is especially important on a college campus, she says. "It's considered the quintessential marketplace of ideas," she says. "It's really in the best interests of all of us for college students to be able to form groups around a diversity of ideas and be treated equally by college officials."

She cites top court cases that upheld the right of a Boston St. Patrick's Day parade organizing group to bar a gay group, and the right of the Boy Scouts to bar a gay scoutmaster.

But Schulman says those cases involved state regulations -- in the Boy Scouts case, for instance, the state of New Jersey had compelled the Scouts to admit the gay scoutmaster.

In this case, Hastings is not forcing the CLS to admit anyone, he says. It's just making school recognition and benefits contingent on open membership.

Dorf agrees. "The case will turn on whether the court sees this as a subsidy case or as a kind of Christians-against-the-lions case," he says.

The court will hear oral arguments from both sides at 10 a.m. Monday.