Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
It might be. But symbols matter.
Agreed. This is why I support things like marriage equality versus just civil unions, because while the legal situation can be make as close to identical as one wishes, there is still important symbolic differences. And so on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
The nature of the requirement is a self-declaration. There's no "test" other than a signature. It's not as if the students sit in a circle around future leaders and throw theological questions at them that they must correctly answer in order to become a leader.
Would it be significantly different to ask leaders to sign some sort of "honor pledge" for leadership?
Depends on the pledge, but I think it at least can be a meaningful difference here. As in, if the pledge isn't inherently discriminatory this is meaningfully different than a pledge (or declaration that one signs) that requires one to be a specific religion/gender/race/etc. If one has accepted that a university is a place that tries to put in place nondiscrimination against such major groups, then the type of pledge matters. Of course, there will always be grey areas around the periphery.
One sort of odd quirk is that in a sense any pledge is discriminating against whoever might not want to uphold that pledge. For instance, a pledge not to have sex until married "discriminates" against those who do not wish to refrain from sex until marriage. In the legal system, we accepted a notion of "heightened scrutiny" for particular classes based on levels of historical oppression such as gender, race, religion, and these days the battle is over inclusion of sexual orientation on such a list. I think the same basic idea applies here: pledges that explicitly discriminated against groups with heightened scrutiny - such as your religious status - aren't excepted while those that speak to general values or morals or what have you without explicit mention pass.