The Right To Be A Campus Bigot

If anything, the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Monday in the case of a Christian student group refusing to admit gay or lesbian members seems to strongly suggest that SCOTUS is very interested in allowing the right to bigotry.

With pointed questions and sharp tones, the court's most vocal conservatives repeatedly challenged the University of California's Hastings College of the Law's treatment of the Christian Legal Society. The skeptics say the school violates the organization's First Amendment rights to define their own membership.

"It is so weird to require the campus Republican club to admit Democrats," Justice Antonin Scalia said, using an analogy. "To require the Christian society to allow atheists not just to join, but to conduct Bible classes, that's crazy."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito voiced similar sentiments. As is customary, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, a frequent Scalia ally, was silent throughout the hour-long oral argument.

"I'm pretty optimistic," Stanford Law School professor Michael McConnell, the attorney for the Christian Legal Society, said on the Supreme Court steps afterward.

In a sign that the closely watched freedom-of-religion case is heading for a split decision, however, justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether another group might ban women or minorities under the Christian group's reasoning.

"What is wrong with the purpose of a school to say, 'We don't wish (to recognize) any group that discriminates?'" Sotomayor asked.

Justice John Paul Stevens, participating in one of the last oral arguments of his 34-year career, echoed the point by asking about a hypothetical student group whose "belief is that African-Americans are inferior."

McConnell replied that a student organization could be allowed to require members to hold racist beliefs but couldn't be allowed to restrict membership based on an applicant's racial status.

"You can have a student organization, I suppose, of that type," Scalia offered, but "it wouldn't include many people."

That's rather shocking.  Scalia is basically saying that in a situation where a college student group wanted to promote racism against blacks, it was the college's problem that it forced the college to take all comers if it wanted to be an officially recognized group, and that it wasn't fair to the group that the mean ol' college was making them take black people who showed up in exchange.

Scalia seems to strongly support the right to the group's discrimination outweighs the college's right to demand equal admission among student group members.  That's outrageous.  I don't honestly know what to say to this.

But it's clear to me that the conservatives on the court wish to enshrine the right to be a bigot into law in this case.