Christian Legal Society v. Martinez: Vast Dangers—Confirmed

First Thinks
June 29, 2010
Hadley Arkes

The Supreme Court convened on Monday in its final session of the term and released its judgments on a number of cases that have drawn deep interest—and stirred high anxiety.

One of the judgments was the case of the Christian Legal Society at the Hastings Law School in California (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez). I wrote on this case in our issue of June/July (“Vast Dangers in a Small Place”), and I regret to report that the outcome turned out to be quite as grievous as the one I anticipated in that piece.

Justice Ginsburg, in her opinion for the majority, makes light of the disabilities that have been saddled on this small group of Christian students. Justice Alito, in his dissenting opinion comes closer to the truth when he remarks on the principle he thinks established in this case: “no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.”
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But even that sense of things stops decorously short of naming the unlovely facts before us: The way has been prepared now to push Christian groups off the “better” campuses in this country, private or public, and to stamp orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims as illegitimate, with no standing to respectability in the life of their colleges and universities...

...But Ginsburg serenely misses the point: It is not about the money or the use of the bulletin boards and websites. It is about the willingness to withdraw, from Christian groups, their claim to stand as fully legitimate groups in the life of the college, as though there were something faintly noxious about them, something that bars them from the company of people who respect the claims of propriety and reason.