Yale Law School has good reason to worry about Sen. Ted Cruz’s well-aimed threat of legal action against it for what certainly looks like religious discrimination.
Student groups led by an LGBT advocacy group known as the Outlaws pressured the university to refuse otherwise widely available stipends or loan forgiveness to students who take summer or postgraduate fellowships with organizations promoting traditional Christian views.
The Outlaws began their campaign after the campus Federalist Society committed the supposedly vile sin of sponsoring, as a campus speaker, a lawyer for a traditional-faith-based public-interest legal group with a superb record of winning cases in federal courts.
The Alliance Defending Freedom has won numerous religious-liberty cases before the Supreme Court, including the famous case of the Colorado cake artist who refused to use his craft for a homosexual wedding. The increasingly discredited leftist group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center ludicrously has labeled ADF a “hate group” — as if a respected legal organization with multiple wins at the Supreme Court is akin to white supremacists or anti-Semites.
In response to the protesting student groups, Yale announced that its Summer Public Internship Fellowship program, its Career Options Assistance Program, and post-graduate fellowships, all of which are generally available for students “working in public interest, government, and not-for-profit organizations,” will no longer be eligible for those working for public interest groups that “discriminate” on issues of “sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”
What this means, of course, is that all professional public interest groups are equal except those that adhere to mainstream, traditional Christian faith. Enter Cruz. Last week, he sent a letter to Yale correctly noting that its policy discriminates on the basis of religion.
“Federal civil rights laws prohibit discrimination based on religious faith,” he wrote. “As a recipient of federal funds, Yale is obligated to comply with these protections.”
Cruz announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution “is opening an investigation into Yale Law School’s policy.” The investigation, he wrote, may lead to “a referral to the Department of Justice for action against the law school.”
This is serious stuff. And Cruz is right — not just legally, but logically and ethically. Any public interest group that takes positions on issues is “discriminating” in its choices, in one way or another. That sort of choice-making is what free exercise of speech (and faith) is all about.
But any group that commits invidious discrimination (such as refusing to hire people on the basis of race) is ineligible for the tax-exempt status that groups like ADF enjoy. Yale is therefore wrong to label a mere difference in outlook as being akin to invidious discrimination, in a way that overcomes what otherwise must be a presumption of neutrality when applied to benefits Yale offers its students.
Yale, as a private institution, is of course free to choose how it delivers its subsidies. But if it wants federal funding, Yale itself must employ neutral rules for those subsidies. By accepting federal funding, Yale especially can’t discriminate on the basis of the religious viewpoint or conduct of the group that would hire Yale students as summer interns or fellows.
For a legal group to argue against enforced participation in a homosexual ceremony is far different from its promoting invidious discrimination against homosexuals as a class. That’s what the Supreme Court says, and that’s what good logic also insists.
Yale’s policy discriminating against traditional Christians is indefensible. Rather than fight Cruz, the law school should cease and desist.
