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Supreme Court Accepts Vital Religious Freedom of Association Case
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The U.S. Supreme Court last Monday accepted for review Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case concerning the rights of student religious organizations at public educational institutions to insist on religious standards for their leaders.  The Hastings College of the Law, part of the University of California system, refused to recognize the student chapter of the Christian Legal Society on the grounds that the group is being discriminatory by insisting that all of its officers and voting members must subscribe to basic Christian beliefs.

The case is important for religious student groups.  Are the public colleges or universities or public schools where the students attend free to declare the groups outlaw organizations that need be given no accommodation, such as meeting spaces, even though the same institutions are happy to host all sorts of other selective organizations?

The Supreme Court's eventual decision will have much broader significance:  a ruling in favor of the CLS chapter will help to undermine the extremely harmful but popular notion these days that religious organizations that select staff or leaders based on religion are bigoted and can have no rational reason for their action.  Our society has no difficulty understanding why environmental groups want to hire passionate lovers of the creation and why Democratic Senators do not fill their offices with Republican employees.  Yet when it comes to religious organizations, all too many lawyers, judges, politicians, and editorialists insist that the organizations should pay no attention to whether job applicants are committed to the religious mission of the organizations.  You might think that the critics are intent on undermining those religious organizations and their role in society . . .

See also:

There is extensive background information on the case at the Christian Legal Society website.

Gregory Baylor and Timothy Tracey, "Nondiscrimination Rules and Religious Associational Freedom," Engage, vol. 8, no. 3 (June 2007).

In a blogpost at the indispensable GetReligion blog, Terry Mattingly asks what the reaction would be if evangelical Christian students flocked to the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance at a public university and could not be kept from taking over the club and radically changing its policies because excluding these students would be, well, discriminatory . . .

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President Obama made one very large structural change when he took over the federal faith-based initiative:  he created the Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships--25 religious and secular leaders that provide perspectives on federal policy in general and also specific advice how the federal government can best work with faith-based and community-based organizations. 
 
Beyond that, he kept in place the existing faith-based apparatus, but with a revised name. So, in addition to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, headed by Joshua DuBois, there remain counterpart centers in 12 major federal departments--so that the work to optimize federal support of and collaboration with civil society groups, both religious and secular, will occur right where federal policies are designed and implemented. 
 
The centers are located in:  Health and Human Services; Housing and Urban Development; Justice; Education; Labor; Commerce; Agriculture; Veterans Affairs; Homeland Security; USAID; Small Business Administration; and the Corporation for National and Community Service.
 
You can now access the 12 centers through a page on the White House faith-based office's website.   Not all of the links currently work.  An easy workaround:  type the words "faith-based" and the name of the department into a search engine.  The centers at the departments of Justice and Labor are not yet reconstituted.  Some of the center websites still have the old name--Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
 
The most important point of continuity:  the governing rules remain those developed during the Clinton and Bush years, in response to the Constitution, US Supreme Court cases, congressional legislation, and the Bush Dec. 2002 Equal Protection Executive Order.  Thus, e.g., the "Regulations" link at the HHS Partnership Center takes you to a page with a link for the HHS Equal Treatment regulations (as well as links to the Charitable Choice regulations that apply to three HHS programs).  The Equal Treatment and Charitable Choice regulations will remain valid unless they are rescinded or modified through a lengthy and public regulatory process. 
 
See also:
 
Stanley Carlson-Thies, "Faith-Based Initiative 2.0:  The Bush Faith-Based and Community Initiative," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 32, no. 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 931-947.

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The Nov. 28th issue of The Economist carried an interesting article, "Missionary positions:  The religious influence in politics," noting that, despite England's secularism, both the Conservative party and the Labour party contain influential Christian voices who are helping to shape their respective party's social policies.  Conservative leader David Cameron is promoting his own version of "compassionate conservatism"--"with its professed zeal for fighting poverty and revising civil society."  The Labour party has religious roots of its own, and 44 members of its current parliamentary contingent belong to the Christian Socialist Movement.

The article notes that it is damaging in contemporary secular  Britain for a politician to be regarded as too serious a religious believer or, horrors, "as righteous."  But the real world has not been remade in the secularists' image.  Thus, the article notes, one reason that a welfare reform bill easily passed Parliament earlier this year is that "Labour MPs who had witnessed the failure of a decade of spending to improve some of their constituents' lives came to see irresponsibility and other moral failures as part of the problem."  

There is no reason, the article says, to expect a resurgence of explicitly religious politics in England.  Christian politicians "wear their faith lightly in the political sphere, invoking values rather than religious doctrine."  Still, the article concludes, "[I]n a country where profound social problems have survived a decade of massive state spending, politicians could be forgiven for looking beyond secular technocracy for answers."

See also: Commission on Urban Life and Faith (UK Anglican and Methodist churches), Faithful Cities:  A Call for Celebration, Vision and Justice (2006).

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The Washington Post lectured the Catholic Church on religious freedom in a recent editorial (December 5).  In "Can this marriage be saved?," concerning the impact on individual and institutional religious freedom of a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in Washington, DC, the Post tells church leaders that a compromise policy on domestic-partner benefits that Georgetown University has accepted is good enough for the entire DC Archdiocese--no need to consult constitutional lawyers or religious freedom experts. 
 
And then the editorial goes on to condemn church authorities for wanting to protect the adoption policies of Catholic Charities:  "This won't do.  If Catholic Charities wants to exclude gay and lesbian couples from its adoption services, then it should do so without receiving taxpayer money." 
 
But why should Catholic Charities not be able to receive DC funding if it regards mother-father homes as the best placement for orphans?  The Post gives no reasons.  It isn't illegal in DC to place children with mother-father families, so why can't Catholic Charities specialize in such placements?  Does no group currently serve gay couples that want to adopt in DC?  The Post doesn't bother to say.  Will driving Catholic Charities out of its adoption collaboration with the DC government increase adoptions in DC?  The Post doesn't ask or answer the question. 
 
And should every organization that gets DC money be required to provide the same services as other groups lest it be charged with discriminatory choices?  So the community group that works with gang members should also offer after-school violin lessons in tony private schools?  The fatherhood programs have to serve mothers?  Council member and former mayor Marion Barry ought to be required to press for services for youth in rich northwest, as well as neglected southeast, Washington?  
 
Hey, maybe if the Post gets any kind of DC government support, it should be required to run editorial content from the Washington Times!

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Rick Cohen, "Will the Social Innovation Fund Fund Social Innovation?"  This paper was commissioned by the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal for a October 19, 2009, discussion convened by the Center about the Obama initiative to support innovation in the nonprofit sector.  The transcript of the discussion is also available.