EDITORIAL: Free association
High court takes up First Amendment case
High court takes up First Amendment case
On Monday, called upon to overturn yet another piece of "inclusionary" nonsense from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether a public university can force a Christian student group to accept as voting members students who explicitly reject core tenets of the group's faith.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave ...
The case is Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. At the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, the Christian Legal Society is an evangelical Christian student group that accepts all students at its functions but requires voting members and leaders to sign a statement of faith. The statement endorses "biblical principles of sexual morality," and makes clear that a student who "advocates or unrepentantly engages in sexual conduct outside of marriage between a man and a woman" isn't eligible to vote for or become a group leader.
If they were, what would be the point of having the group?
The group's petition to the court explains: "A person's mere experience of same-sex or opposite-sex sexual attraction does not determine his or her eligibility for leadership or voting membership." CLS does not prohibit gay students from voting membership or leadership positions -- providing the gay student shares CLS's view of homosexuality.
The distinction may seem a bit convoluted, but so is case law on the First Amendment's freedom of association. The court has held, for instance, that a Jaycees chapter could not continue excluding women from membership, since the group could not articulate any specific way in which admitting women would be at war with the group's purposes.
On the other hand, the case most closely on point is Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), in which the Supreme Court ruled that the private organization had the right, under the Constitution, to discriminate in its hiring policy because the organization stood primarily for certain values.
