In the latest display of “diversity” madness at our nation’s colleges, a Christian student group is suing the University of Iowa after it was kicked off campus by the school for requiring its leaders to actually be… Christian.
Nicole Russell, writing in The Washington Examiner, reports the university will not allow the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to hold meetings on campus because it requires its members to “hold to specific faith standards.”
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has stepped in to support InterVarsity, which had been on campus for 25 years, in its suit against the school.
Practice your religion our way
“Everyone is welcome to attend [InterVarsity meetings],” Becket’s Daniel Blomberg told OneNewsNow in an interview. “They just ask that if someone is going to lead the group that they believe in the God they’re praying to – [and] according to the University of Iowa, that’s now a step too far.”
The university kicked another Christian group off campus in 2017 for similar reasons. Business Leaders in Christ was barred from holding meetings on campus after a homosexual student who was seeking to be vice president of the group filed a complaint with the university saying he was denied the position “due to my being openly gay,” according to a lawsuit the Christian club filed against the school.
The Christian Post reports university dean of students Lyn Redington told the group it had to “revise” its religious beliefs and present an “acceptable plan” for picking leaders in order to be reinstated as an official group on campus.
“This is 2017, not 1984,” Jacob Estell, student president of Business Leaders in Christ, said in a statement, “Our beliefs weren’t made by us, and they can’t be changed by us either – certainly not just to satisfy Orwellian government rules.”
The group won a temporary injunction in its lawsuit in January but U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose said in her ruling this was only because the school did not apply its standards equally to all other student groups, Courthouse News Service reports.
The main contention by the University of Iowa that it had a right to kick a Christian group off campus for holding certain religious beliefs was not challenged by the court.
In fact, a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Christian Legal Society Chapter v. Martinez, specifically allows colleges to act in this reprehensible manner.
“It was a total bait and switch. They told our clients to clarify their beliefs [so that] they would be able to stay on campus,” Becket’s Eric Baxter, who served as the club’s lead counsel in its lawsuit, told The College Fix. “When our clients did that they were totally shocked and surprised a university would penalize them for their beliefs.”
One target only
A couple of points need to be made here.
First, the University of Iowa kicked Business Leaders of Christ off campus in 2017 while doing nothing to challenge the status of a Shia Muslim group that mandated that its members adhere to Shia Muslim beliefs.
“The Islamic organization Imam Mahdi reserves certain membership benefits, including leadership roles, to members who are Shia Muslims,” said the Business Leaders of Christ lawsuit. “The group also requires its leaders to ‘refrain from major sins (kaba’ir) and endeavor to avoid minor sins (saga’ir).'”
A months-long university investigation focused only on a Christian group resulting in its removal from campus and all the while a Muslim group was allowed to continue as an official school student group in good standing without having to bow before the school’s secular altar of “human rights.”
Clearly, the University of Iowa would have loved to stick to this blatantly hypocritical position if the judge did not bring up the equal-standards issue in her ruling.
But because she did, the school went on to decertify Imam Mahdi and 37 other student groups in order to meet the equal-application judicial ruling, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports.
This move freed the school up to kick InterVarsity off campus.
Author: Joe Schaeffer
Funding those who hate you
The second point to be stressed is that the University of Iowa is a state-sponsored university. It received $229.3 million in state funding for the 2018 budget year, according to the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
According to a Pew Research Center study, 77 percent of the residents of the state of Iowa are Christians.
Christian taxpayers are footing the bill for social-engineering academic tyrants to discriminate against their sons and daughters when they attend the University of Iowa. The school receives a large dose of federal funding as well, and a federal judge has ruled that the university has every right to kick a Christian group off campus for wanting to uphold Christian beliefs, just as long as it kicks everyone else out who opposes its “human rights” diktats as well.
