Since the Supreme Court’s sharply divided and startlingly wrongheaded decision two years ago in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, those concerned about religious liberty on campus have known that the fallout was on its way. At Vanderbilt University, it has arrived — and it’s as bad as anticipated.
In Martinez, the Court determined that public institutions like the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law could require all student groups — even those based on shared belief, such as religious and political organizations — to admit members and even leaders without regard to their beliefs. Groups like the Christian Legal Society (CLS), whose constitution required students to have traditional Christian beliefs (such as in Christ’s bodily resurrection) and morals (no sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage), could be required to remove those provisions from their constitutions and admit “all comers,” or else face “derecognition” and the corresponding loss of access to meeting space and other benefits that all other groups enjoyed. To lack recognition is basically not to exist at all on today’s college campus.
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Justice Alito, writing for the minority in the 5–4 decision, warned that the decision would be used as a “weapon” against groups with viewpoints that are unpopular among the vast majority of college administrators, since the immediate negative impact of the decision would fall mostly upon the religiously and politically conservative groups those administrators already disfavor. Other critics such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, where I work) warned that an all-comers policy would sweep within its ambit political groups as well, and invite takeovers and spying by members of opposing groups who wished to cause mischief or even destroy their rivals. At minimum, such a policy guarantees that a group will have no mechanism to maintain a consistent message.
The complications of adopting such policies have delayed their adoption by many public universities. Ohio even passed a law against such policies at its state schools. Yet the Supreme Court’s seeming endorsement inspired Vanderbilt to jump in with both feet — despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s decision did not affect private universities. (Private universities are not subject to the First Amendment and may completely abolish religious freedom if they wish; few do.) Last fall, it announced that a new “all comers” policy would soon be enforced, and after months of avoiding questions from nearly everyone under the sun, including FIRE, the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and 23 members of Congress, Vanderbilt finally held a “town hall” discussion on its decision on January 31. While the discussion was scheduled to last 90 minutes, religious students showed up with so many concerns that it ran for three hours and was so packed that many were turned away at the doors.
A video of the meeting leads the viewer to a startling revelation: Vanderbilt administrators are adopting the policy for the purpose of undermining certain religious beliefs, and, as usual, evangelical and Catholic Christians are the main targets. This is just the kind of use of an all-comers policy that the Supreme Court, in the Martinez case, said would be unacceptable in a school that had to respect the First Amendment.
The $25,000 question is when will it become politically correct to feed Christians to the lions in the at the University's football stadium? That is the trend of American schools.
We can't have those judgemental Christians thinking politically incorrect thoughts and a steady diet of good Christians will help bring the lions off the endangered species list.
This is what happens when religious people become too stupid and let their entire communities die to avoid being left out of sex parties or some other cool activity that convinces people to give up decent lives.
In college 99.9% of the other Christians felt it was a bigger duty of theirs to make sure their cool secular friends didn't get freaked out by my religious beliefs than to actually defend their religious beliefs (cowards). Mpst people who go to church now are these absolute pathetic losers who have this smug attitude like they're smart enough to go to church but too smart to believe in any of it. And they truly do turn it in to an impotent social club where to actually live and speak your beliefs would be considered offensive. Leftists love these worthless social clubs because they preserve the lie of true religious freedom in this country.
You only have freedom of religion in Obama's country if your sacraments are condoms, abortifacients and abortions.
"Former first lady Laura Bush has broken with her husband on the premier social issues of his administration and said she backs gay marriage and abortion.
Laura Bush said abortion should "remain legal, because I think it's important for people, for medical reasons and other reasons."
When King asked if she could accept gay marriage, the first lady said: "I think we could, yeah." "You think [legalization of same-sex marriage] is coming?" asked King.
A once great institution has been hijacked by a bunch of nincompoops. I am amazed at this silliness, and that we continue to subsidize these folks' extravagance with our tuition dollars.
Tax exemption for religious organizations is effectively a taxpayer subsidy. My First Amendment rights are nonexistent, but you complain because private citizens freely transact with a private institution.
My oldest son, a freshman, was at the town hall. His description matches this one.
They've made their rules. Now let's see if they enforce them. If 30 Christians decide to join the 20 member Vanderbilt Young Jihadis and use their majority vote to change the charter to eating bacon and singing Christmas carols, we'll see about Vanderbilt's commitment to diversity.
"Christians just don't do that sort of thing" you may say. Well maybe they should.
One can imagine the support that the administration would give to a group of committed Christians who joined a GLBT student group in order to vote for an officer who advocates for heterosexuality.
Maybe members of the football team could run an officer for the Hispanic Women Engineers' Club?
As a parent of an up and coming high schooler, it pains me to see how few colleges seem to still be places of logic and reasoning. But I guess I'll save a lot by not spending on private school tuition.
Right, Christians just don't do that sort of thing, unless you count the Inquisition, Crusades, conquest of the Western Hemisphere, slavery, colonization, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina, Apartheid, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan/Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya. That list is not exhaustive, but you get my point.
While it wouldn't shock me to think of Christians trying to destroy a rival religion (as is happening against Islam), you can't force someone to eat something against his or her will, even if you're a religionist.
Christians need to grow up and stop pretending to be victims. Nobody is going to keep you from your fairy tales, even though we generally discourage children to give them up by grade school.
Secularism is a religion; it is a Godless religion, but it is a religion none the less. When you advocate a particular course of action you are simultaneously advocating in opposition to competing schools of thought; this is unavoidable.
What I find truly disturbing is that the word "Secular" did not come into being until some seventy five years after the ratification of the United States constitution. The United States government was not founded on "Secular" traditions and beliefs...
Secualrism has never been one of these truths we hold to be self evident.
It is often said that most of the Founding Fathers were not religious but that is not exactly true. Most of the Founding Fathers, like their society, were Protestant Christian. Indeed, one could not vote unless one was a Protestant Christian in most States. Maryland was an exception to this but even there non-Christians were not allowed a vote or to hold public office. The Jefferson Bible you refer to did not have the spiritual parts removed but had those parts which Jefferson thought improbable removed.
True, but I would say Atheism and Secularism ARE religions with a "god" - they simply create one in the form of the free/autonomous individual. It goes right back to Adam and Eve and human's self-delusion that they can know good and evil on their own without reference to the true God.
And where Atheism fails to define "God" broadly enough to account for the religious root of all thought, the Vice Chancellor demonstrates how Secularism can be appropriated by Christians who, without justification, presume they can neatly divide life into "religious" practices/activity which must be confined to your so-called "personal life," and "secular" practices/activities, which are granted better rights in the so-called "public life." All the while, the VC, an adult presumably capable of self-critique, is either too ignorant or lazy to understand that this conception of the world, which he adopts, IS ITSELF A RELIGIOUS VIEWPOINT! And thus the hypocrite forces his religious view on others while simultaneously saying it's wrong "to impose my beliefs on others." LOL. Welcome to 21st Century America, where A is not A, and grown men proudly contradict a stated principle within words of making it...
