Courts

Religious School Pushes To Maintain The Right To Keep LGBTQ Group Off Campus

That’s one way to bypass those pesky “WWJD” objections.

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rainbow jewish starMost of the recent religious discriminatory spotlight has been cast on Christians trying to turn the United States into a theocracy. This should not be confused for meaning that they are the only ones fighting for the right to discriminate-as-religious freedom; Yeshiva University is also making religious freedom claims — and they are willing to go to court over it.

Yeshiva University filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court on Monday, seeking to block a court order requiring the New York university to recognize a “Pride Alliance” LGBTQ student club.
In court papers, the school says that “As a deeply religious Jewish university, Yeshiva cannot comply with that order because doing so would violate its sincere religious beliefs about how to form its undergraduate students in Torah values.”

I am surprised that things have gotten this far to begin with.  Though I am not a fan of their wishes, Yeshiva is a private religious institution and it’s usually the case that those groups can discriminate on religious ground as long as they aren’t taking state money or something. If this gets up to the Supreme Court, the school will likely not be required to recognize the club.

The application comes as the conservative majority of the court ruled in favor of religious conservatives in two cases last term. In addition, in 2021, the court sided with a Catholic foster care agency that refused to consider same-sex couples as potential foster parents.

My only real worry is that a Court decision may sneak some foreshadowing into its rationale à la pointing toward Obergefell and Brown in Dobbs. The silver lining is that the students interested in forming the group will likely be able to find a space more amenable to their right to convene. It is New York, after all.

 

EDITORIAL UPDATE 08/31/2022 1:07 PM: There is a bit more nuance to the story than how I’ve presented it here. Despite Yeshiva University describing itself as “The world’s premier Jewish institution for higher education“, it is technically, as the lower court found, a secular institution. This puts Yeshiva in an odd liminal space where they’re applying religious values in a secular context, which makes the legal consequences of its actions murkier in a post-Bremerton America.

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Yeshiva University Asks Supreme Court To Let it block LGBTQ student club [CNN]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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