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Viewpoint Discrimination by Public Universities: Student Religious Organizations and Violations of University Nondiscrimination Policies
Washington and Lee Law Review, Spring 2004 by Snider, Mark Andrew
The efforts by the "intelligent left"245 to purge religious expression from campuses highlight how many public universities' campaigns for political correctness have run aground: Attempts to rid campuses of discriminatory groups in order to promote diversity and tolerance ironically have had the opposite effect. Rather than increasing diversity on campus, the elimination of religious groups has resulted in a narrowing of the bandwidth of ideas and thoughts allowed on campus.246 The university essentially silences those groups that diverge too drastically from its diversity-at-all-costs orthodoxy. This discrimination by the university in turn demonstrates that it is tolerant of diverse beliefs only so far as such beliefs reasonably agree with its own.247
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Universities should not decide which religious beliefs are good and which are bad. Students' theology stems not from prejudice or bigotry, but from legitimate religious beliefs which universities should protect.248 Along the same lines, universities also should not determine what a particular religion teaches about a particular issue; for example, a university should not determine whether biblical Christianity in fact condemns homosexual orientation or homosexual relationships as immoral. As such, religious organizations should not be forced to embrace contrary religious beliefs based on an outsider's assessment that their beliefs could or should accommodate alternative viewpoints.
Allowing student religious organizations to set their own membership and leadership policies also permits members of the group to gain self-identity. Hannah Arendt has explained that unfettered speech is eminently central to self-realization because it is the means by which individuals determine the substance of their own thoughts.249 Just as an association of gays and lesbians at a public university might play an important role in the exploration and development of a homosexual's identity,250 religious associations composed of believers of the same faith allow religious students to develop their own individual identity.251
Consistency and good sense also prohibit public universities from derecognizing student religious groups. First, just as university fraternities and sororities exist for the purpose of joining together people of the same sex, the raison d'etre for religious groups is uniting people of the same religion around their common religious beliefs.252 To decree that the group formed around judaism or evangelicalism must uphold all other religious beliefs as equal or expedient is absurd. Second, while public universities have been quick to derecognize some student religious groups for discriminating on the basis of religion or sexual preference,253 the same universities have not derecognized men's glee clubs254 or women's intramural rugby teams for discriminating on the basis of sex255 and have not derecognized nonevangelical religious groups for discriminating on the basis of religion or sex.256 Such disparate treatment of groups, all of which violate some component of the archetypical nondiscrimination policy, raises questions about the real motivation for derecognizing conservative student religious groups.257
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