Kicked Off Campus: Religious Discrimination in the Supreme Court

In recent years, the Supreme Court has been generally friendly to free speech and religious liberty, with one glaring exception: its 2010 ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which opened a new era of hostility toward religious students at public universities. The decision upheld a so-called “all comers” policy that—in the name of nondiscrimination—required student groups at the University of Hastings College of Law to accept anyone into their membership and leadership ranks, even students who outright opposed a group’s mission. With growing demand for “safe spaces” on campus, many schools now turn to Martinez to excuse targeting student groups with unpopular views. Religious student groups have often felt the brunt of these efforts. For example, in November 2017, the University of Iowa kicked a student group off campus on the ground that the group’s traditional beliefs about marriage and sexuality were “discriminatory on their face.” The University claimed that Martinez permitted them to ban student groups that required their leaders or members to affirm beliefs concerning any of the categories in the school’s nondiscrimination policy. But a lawsuit revealed that the University had an odd manner of putting this supposed policy into practice, one that ultimately led the University to deregister Muslim, Sikh, and Protestant groups, among others, while leaving favored religious, political, and racially-segregated groups unscathed. In this podcast, Eric Baxter, from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, shares how the student group stood up to the University, revealing what the Court ultimately held was a clear and unconstitutional pattern of religious discrimination.