Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.
Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation. Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.
With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all. The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian." In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms — backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ — already take on such cases for free.
The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant. A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64% of American adults — including 80% of evangelical Christians — agreed with the statement "Religion is under attack in this country."
"The message is, you're free to worship as you like, but don't you dare talk about it outside the four walls of your church," said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Assn. Center for Law and Policy, which represents Christians who feel harassed....
My guess, as a non-lawyer, is that most states and the federal courts will come down on the side of the nondiscrimination laws. The free exercise of religion in this country has never included the right to harrass others, which is effectively what they're asking for.
My favorite quote from the piece, however, is this:
..... Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait. By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians. "Think how marginalized racists are," said Baylor, who directs the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom. "If we don't address this now, it will only get worse." [...]
Mr Baylor's argument as stated, is that he's afraid that the religiously intolerant will be equated and marginalized as racists are. The very clear implication is that he does, himself, see a sort of equivalence between racism and this sort of intolerance; one wonders, if society hadn't already moved (very slightly) to a point where open and/or official expressions of racism are considered entirely de trop, he might be actually making the argument that, regardless of whether or not it was an "inborn trait", religions should be allowed to express their distaste for the nonwhite among us.
To be absolutely fair, I'm sure that it's not only religious groups featuring primarily conservative whites making these arguments. Most conservative evangelical religions, whether their members be black or white or any other ethnicity or race, likely feel much the same way. For that matter, the Roman Catholic Church makes much the same argument in Massachusetts and California, where it dismantles its adoption wings rather than place children in households headed by gay men and women. It's a very slighly different argument -- "We reserve the right not to provide this service" rather than "We demand the right to be able to tell people what we think of them" -- but essentially the same. No, conservative evangelical groups aren't the only ones trying to make this sort of demand.
I think to some extent, what's going to make a difference in these specific cases is that people are requesting the right to harrass, not simply be intolerant. As the article notes, as long as people are willing to keep their beliefs to themselves, the courts are reluctant to force people to take action against their beliefs, such as signing tolerance documents. (That said, you have to wonder about the federal court in Kentucky that refused to allow a student to be exempt from attending a workshop on gay tolerance because said workshop violated his beliefs; that would actually seem to be pretty much the same sort of case. I wonder if the distinction is that the purpose of a school is to teach and expose peole to things they wouldn't otherwise normally experience.)
All that said, part of the question is whether Mallotra is demanding the right to private intolerance or public harrassment, and where Georgia Tech University and the state of Georgia are drawing that line. Depending on what the sign actually said, it does seem that Georgia Tech might have overstepped in making her paint over her protest sign against feminism and "The Vagina Monologues"; you do have the right to public protest. However, she and the other Georgia Tech College Republicans who sent a letter to the Pride Alliance, calling them "sex club … that can't even manage to be tasteful" might have stepped into the area of harrassment, very broadly considered. (Although you do wonder where the line between simple namecalling -- which this, at a minimum, would clearly be -- and actual harrassment would fall. There does seem to have been only the one letter.)
I do think that these types of lawsuits will fail in most states; directly asking for the right to be intolerant specifically so you can harrass people is not the sort of argument calculated to sway a court to your side.
And the Supreme Court has to be hoping that these cases don't make it up that far ... although I'm sure that at least one or two of them will. Their best bet would be to hope that they get uniformity among the circuits, so that they can refuse the case -- assuming that the uniformity falls out the way they want.
Posted by iain at April 11, 2006 12:00 PM
