According to the Washington Times, last week the Supreme Court set oral arguments for April 19 in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case in which the University of California’s Hastings College of Law denied official recognition to the Christian Legal Society. The school refused to recognize the Christian group because it requires its voting members and officers to abide by an extensive, faith-based pledge that includes a prohibition on all premarital and extramarital sex.
Quin Hillyer at Southern Appeal highlights a key section from the lead brief for the group:
A “variety of viewpoints” is far more likely to be achieved when students are allowed to sort themselves out by interest and viewpoint—Republicans in one club, Democrats in another; Muslims in one organization, Lutherans in another. Without such sorting, all viewpoints are blurred. The Democratic Caucus becomes the Bipartisan Caucus; the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clubs become the Ecumenical Society; and every other group organized around a belief becomes a Debate Club. Each group becomes no more than its own diverse forum—writ small. The all-comers rule thus defeats the very purpose of recognizing any group as a group in the first place. Preventing students from organizing around shared beliefs does not foster a robust or diverse exchange of views.
February 23rd, 2010 | 7:48 pm
Biologists sorted out a problem like this in conservation decades ago. When you maximize alpha diversity (maximize diversity at the fine scale across an entire landscape), you diminish beta diversity (diminish diversity between habitats in that landscape). You also diminish gama diversity – that is the overall diversity within that landscape is diminished.
Of course there is a simpler way to think of it. Maximizing fine scale diversity is what your dairy does with cream and milk to make whole milk – homogenization. The dictionary says to homogenize is to make uniform.
Uniform materials also happen to be easier to manage. Hmmm.
February 24th, 2010 | 8:53 am
And there goes “freedom of association.” It is particularly sad that the Anti-Defamation League is OPPOSED to this free association. I am not sure if they understand that all students are welcome to JOIN the Christian club; they just cannot be *voting* members or officers (there are other organizations like this, who have non-voting members). I wonder how the ADL would feel if they opened a college club, allowed various anti-Semitic radicals to join, then be elected to all the offices, thus effectively destroying the group.
It’s not a wild scenario; witness the eleven students who sat in different seats at a speech (by, I believe, an Israeli diplomat, at a California university), texted each other as to when to disrupt the speaker by standing up and screaming unintelligibly, and who were arrested one at a time over the course of the entire speech.
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