Supreme Court Accepts Vital Religious Freedom of Association Case

Should student groups or clubs be allowed to require standards for their leaders that align with the purpose, goals and vision of their organization?  A closer look is needed when examining the following historic case. 

The U.S. Supreme Court last Monday accepted for review Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case concerning the rights of student religious organizations at public educational institutions to insist on religious standards for their leaders. The Hastings College of the Law, part of the University of California system, refused to recognize the student chapter of the Christian Legal Society on the grounds that the group is being discriminatory by insisting that all of its officers and voting members must subscribe to basic Christian beliefs.

The case is important for religious student groups. Are the public colleges or universities or public schools where the students attend free to declare the groups outlaw organizations that need be given no accommodation, such as meeting spaces, even though the same institutions are happy to host all sorts of other selective organizations?

The Supreme Court's eventual decision will have much broader significance: a ruling in favor of the CLS chapter will help to undermine the extremely harmful but popular notion these days that religious organizations that select staff or leaders based on religion are bigoted and can have no rational reason for their action. Our society has no difficulty understanding why environmental groups want to hire passionate lovers of the creation and why Democratic Senators do not fill their offices with Republican employees. Yet when it comes to religious organizations, all too many lawyers, judges, politicians, and editorialists insist that the organizations should pay no attention to whether job applicants are committed to the religious mission of the organizations (emphasis added).  You might think that the critics are intent on undermining those religious organizations and their role in society . . .

From eNews for Faith Based Organizations: Editor Stanley Carlson-Theis, December 2009

See also:

There is extensive background information on the case at the Christian Legal Society website.

Gregory Baylor and Timothy Tracey, "Nondiscrimination Rules and Religious Associational Freedom," Engage, vol. 8, no. 3 (June 2007).

In a blogpost at the indispensable GetReligion blog, Terry Mattingly asks what the reaction would be if evangelical Christian students flocked to the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance at a public university and could not be kept from taking over the club and radically changing its policies because excluding these students would be, well, discriminatory...