Saturday, May 10, 2008

Christian group sues Pa. university over free-speech rights

We read:
"A religious student group claims that Shippensburg University violated its free-speech rights by threatening to shut it down because it requires members to be Christians and its president to be a man. The Christian Fellowship of Shippensburg University alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that the state-owned university violated a 2004 settlement of a separate lawsuit over the school's student code of conduct.

In that earlier case, a civil liberties group sued the university over a provision in the student code that prohibited "acts of intolerance" including racist, sexist and homophobic speech. University officials said they would revise the code after a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in 2004 barring the enforcement of that provision.

Steven Aden, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom, said the latest lawsuit stems from Christian Fellowship's expulsion from campus by the university's Student Senate in February in a dispute over its membership and leadership requirements,

The Student Senate's vice president later told the group that it could resume operating as a recognized student organization, but members still worry about the prospect of further sanctions, Aden said. "The club is under this cloud of suspicion, whereby their practices are being monitored to make sure they don't step out of line," Aden said.

Source

The use of speech codes to ban Christian groups from colleges seems to have passed its peak but there is still a lot of cleaning up to do.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

From the article:

"A religious student group claims that Shippensburg University violated its free-speech rights by threatening to shut it down because it requires members to be Christians and its president to be a man."

Not that I don't belive in their rights to elect whoever they want as president, but why would they only want a man?

Hershel

Anonymous said...

Why is following their religious beliefs anyone's business but their own?

Anonymous said...

Hershel, because the Bible says that only men can be head of the house and head of the church.