SCOTUS Blocks Ruling Forcing Yeshiva U to Recognize LGBT Club
A lower court ruled that, as a public accommodation, the school was subject to local laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a lower court order that would have forced Yeshiva University to recognize an LGBTQ group as an official campus club.
The court acted late Friday in a brief order signed by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor that indicated the court would have more to say on the topic at some point.
The university, an Orthodox Jewish institution in New York, argued that granting recognition to the group, the YU Pride Alliance, “would violate its sincere religious beliefs.”
A New York state court sided with the student group and ordered the university to recognize the club immediately. The court ruled that, as a public accommodation, the school was subject to local laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and ordered it to recognize the club.
The school filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to block the lower court’s ruling, asking that the case be allowed to play out through the appeal process.
“As a deeply religious Jewish university,” it argued, it “cannot comply with that order because doing so would violate its sincere religious beliefs about how to form its undergraduate students in Torah values.”
The matter is on appeal in the state court system, but judges there refused to put the order on hold in the meantime. The school then filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court.