In a strongly worded “friend of the court” brief submitted on February 4 to the United States Supreme Court, Agudath Israel of America urged the Court to reverse a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and uphold the right of a Christian student group to continue to operate at the University of California Hastings Law Center. The Orthodox group’s brief contends that if the Court allows the law school to deny the Christian group the right to follow its religious dictates (which include limiting membership to members of its faith), then religious organizations and institutions throughout the country could well be relegated to “second class” status and denied many of the freedoms and benefits to which they are currently entitled.
“Christian Legal Society v. Martinez” involves a Christian student group at a state-run law school that was informed by school administrators that it cannot be considered a recognized student organization if it continues to restrict membership to Christians only. Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish organization whose constituents would all be denied membership in the Christian Legal Society, nonetheless supports the right
of such religious groups to “discriminate” on the basis of their deeply held religious beliefs.
As the Jewish group’s brief points out, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees both freedom of religion and freedom of speech and association. If state entities are allowed to deny benefits to a religious organization like the Christian Legal Society, the Agudath Israel brief argues, simply because their beliefs and practices do not confirm to contemporary mores, then many other faiths institutions would also be in danger of being excluded from many benefits because their practices, too, differ from contemporary norms.
The Agudath Israel brief was drafted by Jeffrey Zuckerman and his colleagues at the law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost. Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel, thanked the firm for working pro bono on the brief and urged the Court to heed its message. “If the lower court decision denying the Christian Legal Society the right to operate is upheld, traditional religious communities whose beliefs do not conform to the secular mainstream will be relegated to second class status in our country.
“It is hard to believe that that is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they crafted the First Amendment.”
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2 Responses
The way groups (and schools) work around the non-discrimination issue is by allowing anyone to join knowing that only people of the group (Jewish students, Christian students, Gay students, Black students, Republican students, purple-people eating student, etc.) will join. As long as the school requires all the other groups (and in Berkeley there are bound to be some very weird ones) to have open membership, the school will probably win. However the case is probably not going to be very significant.
If student groups get funds from a public university, then the ban on restrictive membership is precisely what James Madison had in mind when he wrote the First Amendment. There is no right to discriminate with government funds! If the university is prohibiting the student group from existing at all, that is not what Madison had in mind; it should have the same right to rent university facilities as any other group.