Discrimination Against Religion at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire

From the Alliance Defending Freedom:

MADISON, Wis. – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a lawsuit in federal court Thursday on behalf of two students at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire who are being denied credit for mandatory community service simply because their activities involved religion. Under the policy, a student can, for example, earn credit for teaching unless the teaching involves religious instruction, or singing in a choir unless the choir is religious.

“No public university should ever use a community service program as a vehicle to advance and instill anti-religious bias,” said ADF Legal Counsel Travis Barham. “If the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire wants to require its students to perform community service, it must treat all forms of community service as equally valuable. The Constitution and federal court precedent prohibit it from targeting religious community service and denying students credit for it. That kind of animosity toward and discrimination against religion is unconstitutional.”

In the spring, student Alexandra Liebl sought to obtain service-learning credit for the 30 hours she spent volunteering with a second-grade religious education class at a local Roman Catholic church. University officials denied her request, citing the university’s Service-Learning Policy. Upon hearing of this decision and others like it, another student, Madelyn Rysavy, realized that she would not receive credit for the approximately 24 hours she spent volunteering in the same church’s Sunday School classes; therefore, she has yet to submit those hours for credit but would like to have them approved.

Although the Service-Learning Policy explains that “students’ sincerely held beliefs, preferences, and values will be reasonably accommodated in accepting service-learning proposals” and that “acceptance of a service-learning proposal…does not imply endorsement either of the proposed activities or of the recipient by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire,” the policy nonetheless unconstitutionally singles out religious beliefs, preferences, and values for exclusion by specifying that “this public university will not award credit for time spent directly involved in promoting religious doctrine, proselytizing, or worship.”

Although Supreme Court precedents on government and religion are a mess, nothing in the Constitution requires any government body to discriminate against religion. When they do that, it shows their anti-religious bias, not any sort of respect for the Constitution.

As for “promoting religious doctrine, proselytizing, or worship:” are students allowed to “promote” anything else? Would they get credit, for example, for working for an environmentalist group “promoting awareness” of “climate change?” Suppose an organization was not involved in “worship” but rather Transcendental Meditation? The answers are obvious.

If they were working in a program teaching some secular subject, of course credit would be allowed. Credit would doubtless be allowed for volunteering with a local LGBT center, even if the operation worked to flatly contradict children’s religious beliefs. And “accommodating” students’ “sincerely held beliefs” would doubtless be automatic if those beliefs were of a more politically correct sort.

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The Plight of the Campus Religious Believer

From the Intercollegiate Review:

If you’re an orthodox believer at a mainstream college, you don’t need me to tell you that you feel like an oddball, maybe even besieged. Your professors and most of your peers would treat your most deeply held beliefs with condescension and probably horror, if they knew about them.

So what should you do about it?

If you had asked my advice even a few years ago, I would have told you to be the turd in the ­liberals’ punchbowl. When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, I did everything in my power to challenge leftist orthodoxies. I saw offending liberals as a key public service, which I dubbed “insensitivity training.” I relied on, and fought for, the principle of free speech.

That’s long gone on campuses now.

My advice today? Grit your teeth, do your reading, make some friends, get your degree, and then make like Lot fleeing Sodom: never look back.

Sounds depressing, right? Well, I do have some good news, as you’ll see.

Big Mother Is Watching You

Colleges are much less tolerant than they were even back when I was in school. Instead of welcoming free, vigorous debate designed to prepare people for adulthood, many campuses are turning the classroom into a “safe space” where infantilized pseudo-victims can wallow in their phantom pains for four long, pricey years before the college dumps them into the real world and sends the bill. The tenets of your faith, if you stood up for them, might count as “microaggressions,” “trigger words,” or even “harassment.” Citing free speech won’t get you far on most campuses nowadays.

If your creed is anything like mine, it is by any contemporary secular standard “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “patriarchal,” “sexually repressive,” and opposed to “abortion rights.” There is no way to airbrush any orthodox mono­theist religion, especially biblical or ecclesial Christianity, to make it acceptable to secular progressives. It would take full-on plastic surgery, and you saw what that did to the Episcopal Church, Bruce Jenner, and every Jesuit college.

As someone who delighted in debating professors and students in and out of the classroom, it pains me to recommend a “covert-ops” approach. But the battlefield has shifted, and you are now deep behind enemy lines.

And what to do about this?

So keep your head down, and keep your faith. That last part can be difficult when peers and professors attack your religious beliefs as “retrograde” or “reactionary.” But you can do it. You can do it even if your campus ministry soft-pedals any supernatural aspect of your religion, privileging instead some social justice activism. If that’s the case, go find a local church and pray with the grown-ups at a faithful congregation. You may spot fellow students there. Befriend them.

You can also find like-minded students in organizations like the ISI-affiliated group on campus, Young Americans for Liberty, College Republicans, or your campus pro-life club. Maybe even a Greek organization, if those haven’t been banned from your campus. Their meetings could be a “safe space” for you.

It’s not quite as bad as this essay makes out, although anti-religious (or at least anti-Christian) intolerance can be pretty bad.

But:

Some institutions are better than others. A useful (but perhaps a bit dated) ranking of schools by religious commitment can be found here.

Sometimes the students are not as biased as the professors. At Marquette, for example, students apparently split about equally in voting for Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Mary Burke.

Some majors are better than others. Expect a lot of leftist indoctrination in the humanities, the social sciences (except economics and perhaps political science), communications and education. Other majors are better, although you will have to take some courses in those most biased departments.

Plot out your path carefully. You will indeed be in enemy territory.

Intolerance of Christians in . . . Guess Where?

From Real Clear Politics:

As an ancient Christian minority in a mainly Muslim society, Coptic Christians have often been persecuted and marginalized.

Even so, Coptic believer Nadia Eweida was startled at the blatant discrimination she encountered in her job at the national airline. While Muslim women around her freely wore headscarves to fulfill their religious obligation, she was forbidden to wear a cross openly while working. Even Jews and Sikhs received more consideration: the policy was directed solely and explicitly towards Christians. When Nadia complained, political authorities and news media were grossly unsympathetic.

We might wonder why Nadia did not simply give up the unequal struggle, and move to a country like Great Britain, where Christianity is not just tolerated but which actually has an established national church. Why would she continue to tolerate the systematic injustice of an aggressive Islamist regime...

Oh wait, my mistake. Is my face red!

It turns out that although Nadia Eweida really is a Coptic Christian, she was living in England at the time, rather than Egypt, and that her job was with British Airways, at Heathrow. It was her British employers who concluded that public expressions of Christianity were unacceptable, in a land where the Queen is head of state, and the Supreme Governor of the Church by law established. British government lawyers defended that situation before a European court. One suggested that if Christians did not like the situation, they should find other employment. And why so much fuss about the cross, they objected? Wearing it is not an actual requirement of the faith, as opposed to an individual whim, so you can’t insist on any right to do so.

British Christians are not persecuted. Around the world, Christians are massacred, tortured, subjected to bogus show trials, starved into submission, and reduced to penury on the grounds of their faith. That’s real persecution, and nothing like that happens in the United Kingdom.

But it is legitimate to point out that in contemporary Britain, aggressive secularism on a wide variety of fronts is making life very difficult for conservative or traditional-minded Christians. Notionally, such an anti-religious campaign should be targeting all supernaturally-based faiths equally, but British secularism is accompanied by a multi-cultural principle that acknowledges some religious expressions as legitimate manifestations. Hence the tolerance for Muslim headscarves or Sikh turbans in the workplace.

Unfortunately, that respect does not extend to the beliefs or practices of Christians who often come from other non-European cultures -- to a faithful Coptic Christian like Nadia Eweida, or to African or Afro-Caribbean Pentecostals. Most media coverage of thriving African churches in Britain involves ludicrously exaggerated charges of witch-hunting and even human sacrifice by these supposedly primitive fanatics. It’s good to know the old idea of the Heart of Darkness is alive and well in the former imperial metropolis.

Legal cases resulting from religious discrimination have generated vast media attention in Britain. The Eweida affair apart, some other employment conflicts involved nurse Shirley Chaplin, ordered not to wear a cross on her ward duty; or Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar who refused to conduct same sex civil partnerships. Relationships counselor Gary McFarlane was fired because his religious beliefs prevented him offering sexual therapy to same-sex couples. McFarlane and Ladele, incidentally, are both black.

In the United States at least, a clash between gay rights and the rights of religious believers would normally mean walking a delicate legal tightrope. Not in England, though, where the senior judge Sir John Laws -- the amazingly titled Lord Justice Laws -- proclaimed in the 2010 McFarlane case that in any such clash, religious rights would, and must, always lose out. As he said, “The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds...is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.”

You can actually spend a good while dissecting Laws’s prolonged shriek, which also noted that “in the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence.” So much for a few thousand years of theology and apologetics -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic.

So much, too, for the British courts, who have moved beyond parody.

The only hope left for the dissident Christians, then, is the European Court of Human Rights, which in recent years has come to occupy a position in European countries parallel to that of the US Supreme Court. And that is where Eweida, McFarlane and the others are now headed. If nothing else, the cases will contribute to shaping the European Court’s developing stance on religious rights, a topic that has caused fevered debate over the past decade. The Court is at what Americans might call a John Marshall moment, deciding the proper limits of judicial power over an emerging constitutional system.

Who would have thought that in the 21st century, Europeans would still be grappling with defending the basic rights of religious believers who still, after years of secular drift, make up a sizable majority of the continent’s population?

The elites that dominate Europe, of course, are the sort of elites that attack religious freedom here in the U.S.