The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on June 28 that San Francisco’s University of California Hastings College of the Law can withhold official recognition and funding from student groups that are not open to all students.
The policy was challenged by the Christian Legal Society, which alleged violations of its rights to free speech, expressive association and free exercise of religion.
The college refused to officially recognize CLS because it bars non-Christians and people who engage in unrepentant homosexual conduct.
“In requiring CLS — in common with all other student organizations — to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition … Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations,” the Supreme Court said. “CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy. The First Amendment shields CLS against state prohibition of the organization’s expressive activity, however exclusionary that activity may be. But CLS enjoys no constitutional right to state subvention of its selectivity.”
The National Center for Lesbian Rights, which intervened to defend the school’s policy on behalf of the LGBT campus group Outlaw, said the decision “affirmed the longstanding doctrine that university nondiscrimination policies do not violate free speech when applied in a consistent and even-handed way.”
“The court rejected the dangerous argument that anti-gay groups must be given a special exemption from nondiscrimination policies,” said NCLR senior attorney Christopher Stoll.
Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese commented: “The court upheld an important principle for all Americans, that government should not be forced to subsidize discrimination. … Christian Legal Society and groups like it are free to exclude whomever they want — without the financial support of their fellow students or taxpayers.”
Lambda Legal’s Jon Davidson said “CLS was attempting to draw a distinction between status and conduct.”
“But when an organization has a membership requirement that one must believe conduct central to one’s identity is immoral, that’s the same thing as excluding people for who they are,” he said. “It’s wrong of CLS to expect students to fund a group that wouldn’t have them as a member.”
The Supreme Court remanded to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals an additional claim by CLS that Hastings had applied its nondiscrimination policy selectively in this case.
By Rex Wockner
