This morning the Supreme Court announced that it would decline to review the 9th Circuit’s decision in Truth v. Kent School District, a case holding that a Christian student group at a public high school could not limit its membership to Christian students. Although federal courts are generally far more protective of student First Amendment rights at colleges and universities, the 9th Circuit has already extended Truth’s reasoning to the higher-education context – rejecting the Hastings Christian Legal Society’s limitation of voting members to those who agree with the group’s statement of faith.

The battle for commonsense (and historically understood) free-association rights is not over, however. Not by a long shot. The Hastings Christian Legal Society has filed its own cert petition (which is still pending), and the Ninth Circuit now has two additional appeals before it, one from Christian student groups at the University of Montana and the other from Christian Student groups at San Diego State. In the second case, the university even refused to allow one of the groups to limit its leadership (and not just membership or voting membership) to Christians only.

If the Ninth Circuit continues to dramatically shrink free-association rights, it will place itself on a collision course with the Seventh Circuit (in Christian Legal Society v. Walker, the court issued a ringing defense of fundamental First Amendment liberties) and perhaps the Eleventh, which is still considering a Christian fraternity’s claims against the University of Florida.

After now almost a decade of intense public controversy surrounding student free association, I have yet to hear any public institution articulate a compelling reason why it should inject itself into the very membership and leadership decisions of the private religious organizations. As civil libertarian Wendy Kaminer noted in a recent Atlantic blog entry, the relationship between group expression and group membership is not only “obvious,” it is “practically tautological.” Further, any student who disagrees with a religious student group is free to form a competing organization.

But perhaps the “state interest” here is really in control for its own sake. After all, if a student group uses university facilities — so the argument goes — shouldn’t the university have a say in the group’s composition and, ultimately, message? But such reasoning takes the school down a dangerous path, where the marketplace of ideas is crushed in the explicitly ideological zeal to impose an “institutional” (state-approved) message on various hot-button cultural issues. Before such a model can be fully imposed, the Supreme Court will have to speak. Too many of its own precedents are at stake.

The proper way to look at the end of the Truth case is justice delayed — hopefully not justice denied.