M. Casey Mattox is co-counsel for the case referenced in this post. — Erick

Can a public university force a religious student group to deny its faith in order to exist on campus? Does the First Amendment allow government-run colleges to simply ban any group from associating around any common ideas? Can government treat a religious organization’s faith requirements for voting power and leadership positions as the equivalent of racism? The Supreme Court will be examining those questions this term in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.
For the last three decades, Christian student groups have fought to be treated equally with other student groups on campus. Prior to 1981, many universities refused to permit Christian students to worship on campus or even to meet on the same terms as other groups. When the University of Missouri-Kansas City kicked a Christian student group off campus in 1979 for the unpardonable sin of “worshipping,” dozens of schools called the school to ask for advice on how to do the same.
The Supreme Court’s decisions in Widmar, Mergens, Lamb’s Chapel, and Rosenberger largely turned the tide, definitively foreclosing the misguided argument that the Establishment Clause requires government to discriminate against religious students. But this has not ended the hostility to religious groups whose beliefs are out of line with the educational establishment’s orthodoxy.
Having lost their Establishment Clause weapon (because it did not turn out to be one), universities have turned to the next in their arsenal, the application of “nondiscrimination” rules to ban or neutralize religious groups on campus. And the University of California Hastings School of Law has decided that it is willing to go so far as to abolish the First Amendment rights of every student group in order to justify its discrimination against a small group of Christian students.

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