The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Kevin Carey
June 29, 2010, 12:00 PM ET
It was good timing, having Senate hearings on Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court begin on the same day as the Court's 5-4 ruling that the University of California's Hastings College of Law acted reasonably in refusing to recognize a Christian group that denies membership to homosexual students. The Senate hearings are premised on the idea that Court nominees should be chosen and interrogated based entirely on their "judicial philosophy" and ideas about the law. So nominees dutifully say things about modesty and justices as umpires and so forth, even as we all understand that the Hastings decision had nothing to with the law and everything to do with the justices' personal convictions about homosexuality.
Some people believe that sexual orientation is a fundamental element of personhood. From there, it logically follows that a college's obligations to nondiscrimination overwhelm any reasonable deference to freedom of association and religious conviction. If the Church of I Hate Black People had been denied recognition as a student group, it never would have made it to the Supreme Court.
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/HastingsSupreme-Court/25183/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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