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What About Religious Diversity?

The Supreme Court will hear argument today in Christian Legal Society v. Martindale, which involves the question of whether a public college can refuse to recognize a student religious group (deny it access to student activity fees, prohibit it from sending email notices to students and staff, etc.) if the group requires voting members and officers to adhere to its faith. That is, can student Hillel require its voting members and officers to be Jewish, Newman Catholics, etc.?

I don?t want to argue the merits here, but a sense of the controversy is nicely conveyed by the following snippets from three recent discussions that are worth reading in their entirety:

• Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harvey Silverglate asks,
  

  Can a public university force a Christian student group to accept as leaders students who explicitly reject core tenets of the group's faith?
  ....
  There's nothing strange here; one wouldn't expect the College Democrats to accept as voting members or leaders those students who advocate or vote for Republicans. But the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, seeks to enforce a politically correct notion of inclusiveness.
  

• In a similar vein Jonathan Turley, writing in the Washington Post yesterday, asked, ?Can a nondiscrimination policy be discriminatory?? The Hastings Law School members of the Christian Legal Society, he continued, ?found themselves on the wrong side of a nondiscrimination policy when they tried to restrict their organization's leadership to students who adhere to their values.?

• By contrast, writing today on Inside Higher Ed John K. Wilson asks whether student groups ?must be given special rights due to their religious orthodoxy,? and if they are, he concludes ominously, ?the practical effect of embracing religious oaths for student groups? [do colleges ?embrace? the views of all the groups they recognize?] would be ?a violation of individual rights, an attack on student democracy, and a potential increase in administrative power.?
  

As I said, I don?t want to argue the merits or the law here. But I do want to emphasize an irony that Silverglate noted in his concluding sentence:

If the Supreme Court decides that public colleges may deny religious groups the same rights as any other group on campus, the result will be less, not more, genuine diversity on campus.

Turley made much the same point:

CLS v. Martinez is a close and difficult case. The court has to weigh fostering diversity of views vs. combating discrimination. The nation benefits when citizens form groups and advance their ideas. Tax-exempt status is even given to groups to encourage association and free speech -- important pillars of our society. We cannot pick and choose between groups if we are to allow for pluralism.

I?m not sure the case is, or should be, so ?close and difficult,? but then I?m not sure allowing groups to require that their officers adhere to the values of the group involves any ?discrimination.? I am sure, however, that it is at best ironic that those who insist so loudly on the necessity of skin-color ?diversity? let loose with a heavy fusillade of legal fire when the prospect of religious diversity, of diversity over values and beliefs, raises its head.

Full post as published by Discriminations on April 19, 2010 (boomark / email).