A judge in Oregon delivered an important victory to Christian colleges last week. In a 40-page ruling, she dismissed an LGBT group’s lawsuit targeting a key religious liberty protection in federal civil-rights law.
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The case began in March 2021 — not long after the beginning of the Biden administration. Forty LGBT individuals organized by a group known as the Religious Exemption Accountability Project filed suit against the U.S. Department of Education in an attempt to push the administration to eliminate Title IX religious protections for faith-based schools.
Title IX prohibits sex discrimination at schools that benefit from federal financial aid, but it has long contained a religious exemption. And now that the meaning of “sex” has been expanded — at least by progressives — to include “sexual orientation and gender identity,” this exemption has become even more important for numerous schools.
The plaintiffs in the case — Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education — applied to or attended more than 30 different religious schools. According to the judge, they alleged the schools (which they called “taxpayer-funded”) mistreated them by “subjecting them to discipline (including expulsion), rejecting their applications for admission, and rescinding their admissions because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
But notice the defendant: At the outset, it was not the schools. It was the Biden administration’s Department of Education — the same administration that on its very first day in power sought to expand the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling linking “sex” in employment law with sexual orientation and gender identity.
Wary of this, Alliance Defending Freedom helped three Christian colleges — Corban University, William Jessup University, and Phoenix Seminary — insert themselves into the case so they could defend themselves.
At the time of that intervention, ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman said: “This lawsuit wants the federal government to tell Christian schools, ‘To continue accepting low- to middle-income students who require financial aid, you have to violate your core beliefs.’ Because that’s neither reasonable nor constitutional, we are pleased that these schools will have the opportunity to defend their freedoms in this case.
“No court should grant a radical request to rewrite federal law and strong-arm religious colleges by stripping their students of much-needed financial aid,” he added.
The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) also successfully intervened and sought to have the case dismissed — calling the plaintiff’s allegations “frivolous.” CCCU noted that students voluntarily choose to join the communities of its member schools, and those institutions were clear and transparent about numerous biblical beliefs, including those related to sexuality and gender. The association warned that this lawsuit threatened federal financial aid that 70 percent of its schools’ students rely on, particularly minority, low-income, and first-generation students.
“Religious freedom was a driving force in the founding of our nation, resulting in the rich multi-faith and pluralistic world of 21st-century America,” CCCU said in 2021. “It is essential that we continue to strengthen the policies and practices that undergird this distinctive American tradition of civic pluralism, which allows people with deep differences to create together a society of mutual respect and common flourishing.”
After more than a year of deliberations, Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court in Eugene, Oregon, ultimately determined that the LGBT plaintiffs’ arguments were not adequate to throw out Title IX’s religious exemption. Indeed, she found some of the arguments “confusing and contradictory.”
“Exempting religiously controlled educational institutions from Title IX… is substantially related to the government’s objective of accommodating religious exercise,” she wrote.
ADF’s Cortman was pleased the ruling “rightly rejected an unfounded assault on the religious freedom of faith-based educational institutions,” and CCCU President Shirley Hoogstra called it a “huge win for religious higher education.”
However, this battle may not be over. The LGBT group is considering its options for appealing the case, and one CCCU lawyer told Christianity Today that the plaintiffs could also attempt to file suits directly against the schools.
Fueling these challenges will no doubt be the judge’s apparent agreement that the plaintiffs did in fact experience injuries from unequal treatment. In her ruling she also highlighted that the Department of Education did not dispute these injuries.
One of the plaintiffs said: “Unlike some people in my family, the federal government at least admits that there is indeed harm being done to us. But in a similar fashion, they refuse to provide any action to correct such harm. It’s devastating, but our fight is far from over.”
Another angrily declared that the government is showing itself to be “complicit in both allowing and perpetuating homophobia and transphobia. … These taxpayer-funded religious schools ought not be privileged over LGBTQ+ students’ safety and vitality.”
We should thank God for this important religious-freedom victory and appreciate those who battled for it. But let’s be sure to pray, too, that the victory continues in courts of law and in the courts of American hearts and minds. May Americans see the value of faith-based ministries serving their communities freely, in accordance with the deeply held beliefs that make them who they are.
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Aaron Mercer is a contributing writer with two decades of experience in the Washington, D.C., public-policy arena. Photo Credit: Canva.