Freedom for the Faithful
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The victory for civil liberties won by Christian students at Ohio State University last week is one of those cases that is going to have a bigger impact than it has had press coverage. The Christian students forced the university to amend its nondiscrimination policies, by adding a clause to its policies governing student organizations. The new words are straightforward and, we expect, unobjectionable to most Americans: “A student organization formed to foster or affirm the sincerely held religious beliefs of its members may adopt a nondiscrimination statement that is consistent with those beliefs.”
All this means is that religious groups on campus will be able to set their own requirements for membership. But it took a lawsuit against the university to win that right. Ohio State had threatened to revoke the registered student organization status of the campus’s Christian Legal Society after learning that the group did not allow non-Christians or gays to become officers. Ohio State requires all student groups to abide by a policy of nondiscrimination that includes “gender identity or expression,” religion, and sexual orientation.
The president of the Christian Legal Society at Ohio State, Michael Berry, told university officials that anyone – including non-Christians and gays – was welcome to attend the group’s meetings. They just couldn’t be officers. The university wasn’t satisfied. So, on March 12, the Christian Legal Society filed a lawsuit, insisting that the university was violating its members’ free exercise of religion and freedom of association. The Alliance Defense Fund funded the legal challenge.
On Friday, the university relented and adopted its new policy. “For those few who truly and sincerely believe that open membership would violate their religious beliefs, I believe we need to allow them the option of following their faith,” said William Hall, vice president for student affairs. Ohio State deserves credit for recognizing what few campuses do: that faith and bigotry are not the same thing, and that trying to force religious students to surrender their beliefs when they participate in the public life of the university can become a kind of bigotry itself.
