Justices Weigh Rights of Christian Group at Schools
The U.S. Supreme Court appeared sharply divided today on whether public schools and universities may deny full recognition and benefits to student religious groups that require members to subscribe to their beliefs.
"To require this Christian society to allow atheists not just to join, but to conduct Bible classes, right?" Justice Antonin Scalia characterized the central question during oral arguments. "That's crazy."
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor pressed the lawyer for the Christian Legal Society chapter seeking full recognition at the University of California's Hastings College of Law in San Francisco about whether schools should be allowed to pick the best way to achieve their goal of prohibiting discrimination.
"Don't we give deference to an educational institution in terms of the choices it makes about affecting its purposes?" Sotomayor said. "And the purpose here is, we
don't want our students to discriminate."
don't want our students to discriminate."
Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (Case No. 08-1371) has attracted wide interest from college groups, K-12 education associations, and religious rights advocates.
A friend-of-the-court brief filed by the National School Boards Association, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and others school groups
