The United States’ first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for Black Americans, Virginia State University, is under fire and lawsuit for alleged discrimination against two Chrisitan organizations on the 6,000-student campus.
For context, attorneys with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) are arguing that the school violated first amendment rights for the campus chapters of Women of Victory and Bethel Campus Fellowship after placing them under direct school control despite allowing groups of different religious viewpoints to operate with exemption. Going further, the rule banned the two student ministries from even affiliating with their national parent organizations.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, senior counsel Tyson Langhoffer with the ADF made clear that the case hinged on self-evident first amendment rights vis-a-vis freedom to practice and engage in religious expression. “Higher education has really broken from its long-standing desire to promote intellectual diversity and to actually seek truth. Hi, my name is Tyson Langhoffer. I’m senior counsel with the Center for Free Speech at Alliance Defending Freedom, and we recently filed a lawsuit against officials at Virginia State University on behalf of Bethel Campus Fellowship and Women of Victory, and the lawsuit essentially involves Virginia State’s change to its recognized student organization policy,” he began.
“Previous to this year, the policy allowed all religious groups to be recognized as student organizations and to obtain the benefits of that, which include access to student fee funding and being able to reserve space on campus and receive the same benefits that every other student organization receives. Unfortunately, this semester Virginia State modified its policy to force essentially all Christian groups under one single campus pastor, and it forces them to disaffiliate with national organizations and to receive permission from the campus pastor before doing any activity on campus,” he went on.
“And so, it’s really treating these Christian groups differently than every other student group. That’s not allowed by the First Amendment. The First Amendment is clear. You know, equal treatment is not a suggestion; it’s a requirement of the First Amendment. The message that it would send is that the First Amendment means what it says: that you can’t treat secular groups better than religious groups, you can’t treat one religious group worse than another religious group, regardless of your motives,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter whether your motives are unity or things like that. You can’t have one single campus pastor on campus that is able to control all Christian groups and then exclude the Muslim group and allow them to receive all of the benefits. And so I think you know that the message is clear that the Supreme Court has held for a very long time that all student groups on campus must be treated equally, and you can’t single some out simply because of what they believe,” he continued.
“Higher education has really broken from its long-standing desire to promote intellectual diversity and to actually seek truth, and instead they are essentially telling students that you know any disagreement, that certain speeches is violence, and that hearing differences of opinions on important topics is actually not encouraged. It’s actually discouraged, and so I think you know Christian groups and groups like Turning Point USA and others that are bringing a different perspective,” he added.
“Our education system has not prepared students to deal with this type of disagreement, and to do it in a productive manner. And so, I think that higher education is really failing in its primary role, which is to educate the next generation into how to deal with living in a pluralistic society with people who have different opinions,” he finished.
Featured image: Kevin Coles, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons