Some Schools Are NOT Waiting on CLS v Martinez

May 24th, 2010
Casey Mattox

Academia waits on the Supreme Court to decide CLS v Martinez, with many universities perhaps hoping that the Court will authorize a new means of excluding religious student groups from their campus. As I’ve noted in a previous post, universities have a long history of wanting to eliminate religious student organizations and many can be expected to take any new opportunity the Supreme Court gives them. But it is worth noting that there are also a number of schools for which CLS v Martinez should change nothing.

Over on the CLS website, a post notes the long history of Universities discriminating against CLS and other religious student organizations by seeking to use nondiscrimination rules to exclude them. The litigation in CLS v. Walker, for example, terminated with a settlement agreement whereby Southern Illinois University agreed to exempt religious organizations from its religion nondiscrimination requirement and agreed that CLS’s nonmarital sexual conduct policies are not “sexual orientation” discrimination. Ohio State University, Arizona State University, Boise State University, the University of Minnesota, Penn State, Rutgers, Washburn University School of Law, and many other universities have similarly entered into binding settlement agreements that would prevent them from applying nondiscrimination rules to prohibit religious student groups from limiting leadership and voting membership to persons who share their religious beliefs. Having contracted to protect these rights, these universities would remain bound by those contracts no matter the outcome of CLS v Martinez. the rest