Judge Wood was a member of the Seventh Circuit panel in Christian Legal Society v. Walker (453 F.3d 853 (2006)). In that case, the Christian Legal Society chapter at a law school provided in its constitution that it drew its leaders and voting members from among those who shared its religious commitments, including its views against extramarital sexual activity, whether heterosexual or homosexual. The law school dean determined that CLS’s bar to active homosexuals’ becoming leaders or voting members violated the school’s equal-opportunity policies, and he revoked CLS’s official status as a student organization. CLS then sued the law school for allegedly violating its constitutional rights.
Here’s a remarkable exchange that took place between Judge Wood and CLS’s counsel at oral argument:
Wood: I suppose from the university’s point of view the concern is now, you know, in the educational setting here is a student who is a member of CLS who is adamantly against homosexuality and sitting next to him or her in the classroom is an openly gay person and it can be a very, ah, poisonous kind of atmosphere.
CLS counsel: The university already tolerates and in fact encourages that kind of clash of ideals. I mean, the SIU law school has recognized 17 student groups, one of which is the Law School Democrats, one of is the Law School Republicans. I can imagine, in the week before the election last fall that those folks sitting next to each other were probably not all that excited about one another. But that’s part of ….
Wood (interrupting): Well, but the Republicans don’t — well, last I checked, I don’t think, maybe this is not right — have a tenet of their society that the Democrats are less than fully human. Ah, that, that’s the problem here.
CLS counsel: It is not true that the CLS chapter has said that homosexuals are less than fully human. Every person, in their view, is created in God’s image, but God, as the Creator, set down rules for righteous living and you don’t help people by telling them that something God does not accept is acceptable. It is not about hatred, it is about love. To tell something, somebody something that’s wrong is right is not loving, and that’s what this chapter would be doing.*
Wood: Goodness!
Set aside Wood’s snide and inappropriate suggestion that Republicans might view Democrats as “less than fully human.” Her vicious assertion that CLS viewed homosexuals as “less than fully human” displayed a hostility to orthodox Christian beliefs. That hostility was the flip side of what President Obama would laud as her own “deepest values,” her “core concerns,” and the “depth and breadth” of her “empathy” for homosexuals.
It’s not obvious to me how the legal issues in the case should have been resolved. But I suspect that CLS and its counsel didn’t believe that they received fair and impartial treatment from Wood, and I’d bet that they weren’t surprised when she—alone in dissent, as it happens—voted against CLS in the case.
* Update: I’m informed by someone who attended the oral argument that Wood conspicuously turned her back to the CLS counsel as he provided this response and that she turned back around to exclaim “Goodness!”