I don't remember if anything has ever been posted on this topic. I might have done so, but if I did it was quite a while ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/us...as-policy.html

The underlying question here is whether a religious student organization can require that leadership must be an adherent to the religion. Note that this applies to leadership, and does not restrict other forms of general membership or general participation.

I want to leave aside the discussion about whether religious organizations should have any formal recognition at all as a category and simply note that most student organizations are asked to self-declare their purposes, and "religious" is currently an option.

As usual in these things I think the question is about underlying funding, both direct (monetary support) and indirect (free or subsidised access to facilities).

If there is funding and an official link to the university, anti-discriminatory policy is legitimate in my eyes. If people want to discriminate, they can do so on their own dollar.

Also this should not be posed as "who should lead" but as "who can lead". An important distinction to have in mind. Saying someone can't lead is very different from saying they shouldn't lead.

Many institutions do not provide any monetary support for student organizations. Access to facilities may be granted, but it's difficult to know whether such access counts as "subsidized" as there are many ways to gain access to a classroom without charge. (A common way to do so is to find an empty classroom and just start using it. Another way is for a staff or faculty member to request a room. There is no financial accounting for such a request. Larger rooms, such as auditoriums and theaters may have fees associated to them.)

I believe I used the framing "who can lead" as did the article. You are free to quote something to the contrary if it exists.

To clarify the nature of this requirement: The student leader is asked to sign a statement of faith.

I generally tend to side that universities ought to have fairly strong interpretations of enforcing nondiscrimination unless there is case for significant harm due. While this does by its nature infringe against religious freedoms, a lot of these issues sort of work themselves out. As in, while it makes sense that a religious group wants to be comprised of religious members with religious leaders, that is going to occur for the most part mainly due to market forces: people who want to be part of religious groups will be religious. For instance, for the most part a religious student group is going to elect religious leaders. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of need to explicitly require leaders to be religious. So it seems that we can maintain an official status of nondiscrimination without any major harm being caused, at least that I can see. The debate here seems to be more a symbolic debate than a practical one.

It might be. But symbols matter.

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?

My college roommate was in a group as described and was asked to be a leader with one caveat--he could become a leader in the group as long as he broke up with his atheist girlfriend. The reasoning given was that Christians shouldn't date atheists because relationships are supposed to come together through Jesus or some nonsense. As a leader, he was supposed to be a role model or something. He chose to be a leader in the group...

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.

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.

It would be very odd to have a "pledge" or "declaration" that requires someone to be a specific gender or race. That's not what a "pledge" generally refers to. "I affirm that I am a male"? "I promise to be white"? I don't see how such a statement could function as a pledge.

Contextually, I just don't see how this makes any sense.

What allows fraternities and sororities to be gender specific? And whatever logic is applied there, what prevents an analogous religious-based argument to be applied?

Saying someone can't lead (ie. forbid them to) an organization is obviously discriminatory. Saying someone should not lead is also discrimination, but is also a natural part of any democratic process.

In other words; if these religious university organizations don't want an irreligious leader, then I suggest they don't elect such candidates as opposed to forbidding them to run.

In other words, you're telling me that I've framed the issue in exactly the way you think it should be framed, and your criticism that it should be framed one way instead of another is an indication that you're not paying any attention to what's going on. I take as evidence that you didn't actually quote something that framed the issue any differently that what I've claimed to have stated that you were not able to find support for your position. Thanks for clarifying.

http://www.samefacts.com/2014/06/eve...d-on-religion/

I'll admit to not being particularly familiar with US campus politics but that seems a good summary to me.

I seriously have no idea what you are rambling about.

I wouldn't expect you to. It's not like you said:

And it's not like I challenged the question of whether anything has been posed as "who should lead." Nor is it like you were unable to quote anything to suggest that your statement was grounded in reality.

So your confusion is fully expected.

I was thinking some neonazi pledge like "I will only associate with white people as the negro has no value" or something stupid like that. The point being, some pledges may be inherently discriminatory and others may not be. So whether a pledge violates a nondiscrimination clause at a university depends on its content.

Typically in the canon gender discrimination hasn't included such things. There are male and female washrooms, woman's only hour at gyms, unisex private schools, etc. But there aren't black only washrooms and white only hour at gyms. Might seem slightly inconsistent, but rightly or wrongly, these are the kinds of norms our legal system has accepted.

I have offered absolutely no criticism of how you have posed anything in this thread. If that is how you interpreted it, I can only say that I am sorry you misunderstood it that way. My comment was directed at the hypothetical person who feels their right to freely elect religious leaders is trampled on.

Setting a religious requirement for membership could be considered discriminatory, I guess. Making religious belief a requirement for leadership of a religious group seems perfectly natural.

Edit: I came to post pretty much what the guy in Aaron's quote in post 13 said. It's a shame he pre-plagiarized me.

Wait, is it OK for a Christian club to state their leaders need to be avowed Christians? Seems logical, I don't see why this should be controversial.

It will be helpful in the future that if you're addressing a hypothetical person that has not actually made any particular argument that you precede your criticism of that currently non-existent comment with something that indicates that you are aware that you're addressing something that nobody has yet said.

You specifically raised gender as a protected class.

We have student organizations which have been granted an exemption to certain forms of explicit discrimination of one of the protected classes you have listed. The question becomes whether the argument that allows for such exemptions have a meaningful religious counterpart. For example, we would probably deem it inappropriate to have fraternities but not sororities. So there's something to do with accessibility to a similar type of organization that serves the equivalent function. There is a religious argument that works under the same logic.

At this point, the legal system seems to have accepted the discriminatory practice that student organizations can require their leaders to be hold beliefs or behave in a manner that is consistent with the core purpose of the organization. There was some commentary that I saw that raised the question of what caused this particular decision to be made.

In a similar case, the threat came down to five words:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014...ty-in-america/

Why would these words which presumably have been accepted in the past suddenly become problematic? (I do not think that this was a new student organization and it's not particularly common for student group constitutions to undergo significant changes -- if for no reason other than it's a lot of work to do that and students will rarely invest that time unless something significant has happened.) The legal precedent is to accept it. So what changed that suddenly this has become unacceptable?

Interesting...

http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/20...wdoin-college/

I'm interested in seeing if the Times either offers a correction, ignores this accusation, or reiterates its claims.

ya, gender, religion, race, etc all get heightened scrutiny but the way that is implemented does differ throughout the legal canon. You can have religious private schools and unisex private schools but not black only schools, so yes there is some consistency but c'est la vie.