The Clash
This articles intersects with a couple of issues we’ve been talking about lately. (Well, I say ‘we’ – I’ve been talking about them. I know that. It’s just me, going jaw, jaw, jaw. I realize that. But I think of it as a discussion anyway – I think ‘we’re’ talking about them. Because…because of a lot of things. Comments, and emails I get, and that tiny little high-pitched voice that no one else hears, and – what meds? I’m fine, cut it out, get your hands off me – )
Sorry. Where was I. A couple of issues. The one about various tensions between cherished goals and ideas, and the one about special treatment of religion.
In the bitter controversy that followed, the Christian Legal Society sued Ohio State, charging that the university’s nondiscrimination policy violated the group’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion by forcing it to accept unwanted members. This past fall, without ever going to court, the group won a complete victory when Ohio State changed its policy to exempt student groups formed to promote “sincerely held religious beliefs.”…Requiring a Christian-student association to admit non-Christians or gay people, “would be like requiring a vegetarian group to admit meat eaters,” asserts Jordan Lorence, a senior lawyer at the Alliance Defense Fund, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “It would be like forcing the College Democrats to accept Republicans.”…Emotionally charged conflicts like the one at Ohio State have forced colleges to choose which of two basic principles is more important: freedom of religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment, or equal protection under the law, as established by the 14th Amendment. “There are times when constitutional rights come into conflict with one another,” says Jeffrey Gamso, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.
Aren’t there just. And such times force one to think hard about which rights, goals, values, ideas are more important (or valuable or basic or non-negotiable or central or various other terms indicating which is less possible to give up) and which are less so. And often such thinking gets one nowhere but at a stalemate, an ‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t know. Because groups are discriminatory, aren’t they. If you have a book group, you discriminate against people who never read. If you have a cooking group, you discriminate against people who eat out of tins and foil bags. If you have a runners’ group, you discriminate against people who prefer to amble or sit or lie flat. And so on. But you don’t really want to see the same principle extended to the Anti-Semites’ group, or the Misogynists’ Club, or the Homophobia Alliance. So you seem to want to judge groups on the merits of their principles of discrimination – and what a can of worms that would be to get into! What a lot of time and trouble that would be. As all these college adminstrators and litigators remark in the article.
Critics of the change are particularly concerned that the settlement exempts only religious student groups from nondiscrimination rules, which may represent an unconstitutional favoring of religious groups over nonreligious ones, says Ruth Colker, a professor of constitutional law at Ohio State. She predicts that the decision could lead to future lawsuits if nonreligious groups are denied recognition because they practice some form of discrimination.
Well, exactly. Here we are again. Why do ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ get special consideration when other kinds of sincerely held beliefs don’t? There seem to be a lot of reasons – habit; religion is consoling; religion is taken to be central to people’s identity; religious people are willing to sue; and no doubt more. But none of them really seems like a knock-down argument or reason, does it. Which is why people aren’t always pleased when sincerely held religious beliefs get special treatment that sincerely held secular beliefs don’t.
Why is freedom of religion the key issue, when freedom of association works just fine without the complications?
Why do colleges fund student groups, therefore getting themselves into these liability issues, instead of letting student groups charge their own members and event attendees for their costs? I never entirely understood that, myself.
Well freedom of religion is taken to be the key issue by the religious groups, not by the universitiy administrations, as far as I understand it. And if that’s the case, I think the reasons are pretty obvious. It’s a crowd-pleaser, it gets a great many people very angry very quickly, it makes the universities back down – it’s a winner. Plus it’s part of the whole Christians-as-victims schtick. Freedom of association sounds so very dry and sexless in comparison, and it’s not such a good victim card.
Why indeed. I bet a lot of them are coming to the same conclusion. ‘Hey, let’s let them pay for their own silly groups. What are we, cruise directors here?’
I’m a Ph.D. student who has been very involved in campus politics, and I think I can speak to the group funding issue: Student affairs professionals and other administrative types generally think that supporting student groups is worth the hassles because they provide such a rich array of educational and social opportunities for students. A wide array of active student groups enrich campus life and contribute to the broader educational mission of the university. In fact, the previous sentence could very well be a more-or-less direct quote from the mission statement of any number of university student affairs offices.
Also, there’s a liability side. Suppose you DON’T fund student groups: But surely you don’t want to bar them from campus entirely, so they will be using campus facilities to hold meetings and events (shows, rallies, fund-raisers, etc.). So whether or not a university funds student organizations, it necessarily plays a supportive role that opens it to liability when something goes wrong – say if someone gets hurt at a student organization event. Given that situation, it’s better to exercise more control over the groups to ensure responsible behavior – and what better way to exert control than controlling the group purse strings? Student organizations that have to follow strict rules and fill out forms to access their own organizational budget can be monitored to make certain they aren’t behaving irresponsibly – which 18-22 year olds are wont to do.
I’ve been thinking more about this some more, and I’m avoiding dissertation writing so…
Seems to me that there are good reasons for universities to support student groups in general, and there are good reasons for universities that fund student groups to insist that those groups do not promote or practice discrimination. The question then becomes, what is discrimination?Student organizations with names like “Campus Hillel” or “Students for Justice in Palestine” are not going to have a whole lot of membership overlap, but self-selection certainly can’t count as discrimination. So the exclusion of some people based on their personal characteristics must be a matter of group policy to count as discrimination, of the “no queers allowed” variety we see in these conservative religious groups. But even in those groups, the “discrimination” is not so cut and dried. Typically, the charter or mission statement of such a group says something about “leading a Christ-centered life” or some such that isn’t on the face of it discriminatory in any way. But who gets to decide what counts as a Christ-centered life? Not the individual Christian, certainly. This is a GROUP, so necessarily the criteria are what the plurality of group members think they are. And if you don’t agree with the self-determined goals, ideals and mission of the group, then it seems reasonable for the group to ask you to leave and go find or found a more suitable group if you would like to do so.
But unlike cases (subject to much-deserved critical commentary by Ophelia) where people are *presumed* to belong to a given group and share its opinions, this is an actual group formed entirely voluntarily by individuals who can come and go as they please, and form their own damned group around different opinions and criteria if they want to, and even bring in enough new members into an existing group to change it if there are enough of them. (I personally think that gay activist students on every campus should quietly join a smallish evangelical student group, then take it over by voting in their own officers and re-writing the group charter or constitution. That’d show ’em! I don’t know exactly who would be shown exactly what, but it would be awfully damned funny!)
Of course, I think the problem is a lot more coherent on college campuses than in U.S. culture at large. And part of the problem is that some very smart guys a long time ago couldn’t write a clear frickin’ law. I mean, come on! “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Talk about multiply ambiguous! Arrggh!
It’s worth comparing the brief and unclear freedom and establishment clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the State of Virginia hand-crafted by Thomas Jefferson:
“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested or burthened, in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief: but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.
“And the legislature shall not prescribe any religious test whatsoever; nor confer any peculiar privileges or advantages on any one sect or denomination; nor pass any law requiring or authorizing any religious society, or the people of any district within this commonwealth to levy on themselves or others any tax for the erection or repair of any house for public worship or for the support of any church or ministry, but it shall be left free to every person to select his religious instructor, and make for his support such private contract as he shall please.”
If only Jefferson’s language had been used in the Bill of Rights, we’d all be a lot better off – and wouldn’t have to rely on the Supreme Court to save us from idiocy when they are growing increasingly idiotic themselves…
Thanks, G; interesting stuff.
“and wouldn’t have to rely on the Supreme Court to save us from idiocy when they are growing increasingly idiotic themselves…”
Yeah. The Supreme Court is such a weak reed – and so full of religious zealots, and only going to get fuller. Oy, oy, oy.
‘There seem to be a lot of reasons – habit; religion is consoling; religion is taken to be central to people’s identity; religious people are willing to sue; and no doubt more’
I can think of another reason. It’s often pointed out on B&W that religion makes truth claims and tries to set itself up as an authority, particularly on ethical issues. By any normal (non-special) standards many of these claims are ridiculous, and some are downright immoral. They require special consideration to be taken seriously.
Not that religious people would admit this though.