Attorney: California Court Lets 'Tolerance Police' Dictate Morality to Christian School
by Jim Brown
July 6, 2006
(AgapePress) - - The California Supreme Court has allowed two teenage girls to sue a Christian high school that expelled them because they were suspected of having a lesbian relationship with one another. But a constitutional attorney is concerned that the ruling puts the rights of Christian institutions at serious risk.
In a letter to the students' parents, officials at Cal Lutheran High School in Wildomar said the "bond of intimacy" that exists between the two girls is "un-Christian." However, the students' attorney argues that the private school is a business establishment in violation of the Unruh Act, the state's anti-discrimination law which prohibits businesses from discriminating on the basis of a person's actual or perceived sexuality. In a San Francisco Chronicle interview, Attorney Christopher Hayes points out the school has students of various religions and should not be exempt from California's civil rights laws. The school, however, argues that it is not a business and is thus exempt from the law.
Steve Crampton, chief counsel with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy, believes in this instance that it may be the faith-based institution's rights being violated. "I think this is a case in point," he asserts, "where you have private schools, Christian businesses -- and really employers of all types, whether specifically and overtly Christian or not -- being given what amount to totalitarian edicts by the 'tolerance police.' This is not freedom -- this is totalitarianism."
Cal Lutheran High School is owned by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which views homosexuality as sinful. School officials have argued that they have a right to deny enrollment to homosexual students. Crampton says the California Supreme Court's decision to allow the two girls' lawsuit to proceed does not bode well for Christian schools and businesses, but he maintains that America's founding fathers never intended to have morality dictated to its citizens by unelected judges.
"The rights of religious individuals and institutions are protected by federal laws over which state anti-discrimination laws cannot take precedence," the AFA Law Center spokesman contends. "Regardless of what California state law may require," he notes, "any such requirement is overridden by the U.S. Constitution."
Religious entities' rights are protected in the Bill of Rights, Crampton points out, and "in particular, the First Amendment -- whether it's the free exercise of religion clause or the freedom of association, also protected by the First Amendment." No matter what the "tolerance police," activist courts, or the California State Assembly says, the attorney insists, "No law can trump that."
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
