WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Alliance Defense Fund and the Christian Legal Society filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court Monday urging it to require an appeals court to reexamine a decision that conferred the First Amendment rights of free speech and association on public law schools.
“Amazingly, public law schools are claiming a constitutional right to ban organizations from campus which the law schools feel have purposes that are not consistent with the philosophy and goals of the schools,” said Gregory S. Baylor, who authored the amicus brief for the case Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR). “No public university has ever had the right to discriminate on this basis.”
In the brief, ADF and CLS argue that conferring expressive association rights upon public law schools will undermine genuine First Amendment values. They contend that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit should not have prohibited application of the Solomon Amendment to public law schools.
Congress passed the Solomon Amendment in response to the widespread practice by universities and law schools of excluding the U.S. military from recruiting on their campuses because they believe the military’s so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for homosexual conduct to be discriminatory.
The amendment restricts federal funding to institutions of higher education that provide military recruiters the same access as other prospective employers. The 3rd Circuit held that the Solomon Amendment is unconstitutional, determining that it likely violates the First Amendment.
FAIR is an association of public and private law schools that seeks to convince students that participation in homosexual conduct is morally acceptable and that disapproval of homosexual conduct is immoral. FAIR is seeking to keep military recruiters off law school campuses because the military takes sexual conduct and orientation into account in its hiring practices.
“This treatment of military recruiters is consistent with how many law schools have treated religious student groups,” Baylor explained. “Such schools have denied or revoked the recognition of some religious student organizations on the grounds that the groups’ leadership policies constitute religious and sexual orientation ‘discrimination.’”
Together, ADF, America’s largest legal alliance, and CLS, America’s premier membership organization of Christian legal professionals, defend religious liberty, human life, marriage, and the family.
