According to this article, Southern Illinois University has revoked the “registered status” of the Christian Legal Society‘s chapter at the SIU law school.
CLS filed suit in April, alleging the law school violated its First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights by revoking the organization’s registered status. SIU dropped its recognition of CLS after a homosexual student complained to law school officials about the chapter’s requirement that its members and leaders be Christians.
…. M. Casey Mattox, litigation counsel for the CLS’s Center for Law & Religious Freedom, is one of the attorneys representing the group. He says SIU is erroneously claiming the chapter violates the school’s affirmative action policy.
The university revoked the chapter
I don’t follow, just from that article, how this relates to affirmative action. The organization apparently admits only Christians, while state and federal laws prohibit discrimination based on religion. Perhaps such laws shouldn’t apply to officially-recognized student groups at public universities – I don’t know anything about the issue – but that seems to me something separate from affirmative action.
Nels,
It has nothing to do with affirmative action. It has to do with the fact that the Christian legal society’s charter doesn’t allow homosexuals to be members of the organization which according to the university violates their nondiscrimination policy.
Richard, I take it that you are familiar with this case, as while the article John cited does note that the complainant was gay, it doesn’t explain the relevance of this. If the organization requires “that its members and leaders be Christians”, and as part of that holds that gays cannot be Christians, then the particulars of that one student’s case may be somewhat different than I thought, but it still sounds as though the organization discriminates based on religion if straight Jews and atheists can’t join.
Nels,
At first I thought the same thing you did. But when I googled it I found out that the Christian Legal Society has a specific prohibition against homosexuals being members in their charter. That was why the University stated that the club violated the University’s nondiscrimination policy after a complaint was lodged by a gay student.
To Richard:
The odd thing is that the article indicates that the complaint was that CLS requires its members to be Christian, not that the group discriminates against homosexuals. FIRE already successfully litigated a similar case in federal court involving a Christian fraternity in North Carolina.
http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/5409.html
“It has to do with the fact that the Christian legal society’s charter doesn’t allow homosexuals to be members of the organization which according to the university violates their nondiscrimination policy.”
It migth also be an establishment problem. This a state school?
Here is the relevant information.
I’m a graduate of the University of Illinois. SIU is widely regarded as a third rate party school. And, it is. You can graduate from SIU with a degree in binge drinking if you just manage to show up for class.
The administration and faculty of SIU seems, inexplicably, to be full of 60s radicals. I can’t imagine that the party animals who actually attend this school have any interest, but there you go. The SIU history department gained some notoriety recently for censuring one of its faculty members for suggesting that his students read a history of the Zebra killings in San Francisco in the 1970s. Black gangsters terrorized the Bay Area with random murders of whites on the streets. Must not discuss black gangsterism! That would be… guess what, racist!
The good thing about the assault on the right of association by this Christian group is that SIU is doomed to lose. FIRE will hand them their heads.
I formed a Christian student organization a few years ago and I read a lot of organizational constitutions before drafting ours. The key clause I found in liberal organizations constitutions was something along the lines of “members must support the general goals of the organization”. I included the same clause in our constitution and I was emailed by the director of student groups. I responded with links to phrase contained in the constitutions of groups representing various countries, sexual orientations, political beliefs, and other issues.
To her credit, she responded back with something along the lines of “never mind”. It makes sense that the Gay and Lesbian group does not want a fundamentalist Christian to join their group and loudly proclaim at every meeting that all gays are going to Hell. It don’t understand why the Christian groups can’t have their own freedom of assembly though.
Ypu seem to have missed about 25 years worth of educational development in the state of Illinois — SIU is has become a well-respected school.
Oh the other hand, researchers at Univeristy of Illinois still haven’t found a way to conver the hot-air and arrogance of the Fighting Illini into an alternative fuel source — or a national championship.
Now, you can insult my alma mater in all sorts of ways, and I won’t object.
But, the hot air research title clearly belongs to the University of Illinois. Long ago, the university pioneered research on methane emissions from cows. Cow farts will soon power your automobile, courtesy of research by the U of I.
Will sadly acknowledge, however, that we will have to wait till next year for the national championship.
I think that the national binge drinking championship is still held by SIU.
The relevant Supreme Court decision is Southworth v. Univ. of Wisconsin.
In Southworth, the plaintiff challenged all University funding of student groups on the grounds that it amounted to a tax being used to support views against the plaintiffs wishes. The SC had a relatively reasonable ruling that universities may dedicate funds to student groups, as long as the university made them equally available to all through a process and the process was “viewpoint neutral.”
A good reading of Southworth would include funding groups even if they advocated views that the government would be prohibited from engaging (religion) since the private group is still advocating the view and the point of the government expenditure is not to express the view but to provide a forum.
Southworth will eventually be tested again to see what universities can’t do, or how far they can go in the “viewpoint discrimination,” but I think university actions like these are in danger of losing on Southworth grounds. The more common example is where universities take actions against student groups that hold bake sales -there have been several cases where I think universities have flagrantly violated Southworth but in the end politics and intimidation allowed them to get away with.