North Carolina passes bill to prohibit discrimination against religious and political groups

From Campus Reform.

Excerpt:

The North Carolina House passed a measure last week to prohibit university administrators from denying facilities, funding, or recognition to political or religious groups on the basis that they are exclusionary.

The bill came in response to Christian groups that have been stripped of their student organization status because they did not allow students with other beliefs to become leaders in their organization.

The bill, which has now been passed by both chambers of the North Carolina legislature, awaits Governor Pat McCrory’s (R) signature.

“Our society is engaged in an ongoing cultural battle,” said Rep. Bert Jones (R), the bill’s primary sponsor. “There is a war on God…Unfortunately these efforts have been extended to our campuses.”

[…]“We need to make clear that just because a student decides to attend our public schools and universities … that does not somehow mean that the student forfeits his rights to the university. This bill also recognizes that there is an important difference between education and indoctrination coercion,” Jones said.

The bill passed the North Carolina House of Representatives by a vote of 78-37 last Wednesday. All 37 votes against the bill were cast by Democrats.

Lest you think that universities are not really doing this to Christian and conservative clubs, here is an example.

From the radically leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.

After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers.

In a collision between religious freedom and antidiscrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.

Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.

[…]The consequences for evangelical groups that refuse to agree to the nondiscrimination policies, and therefore lose their official standing, vary by campus. The students can still meet informally on campus, but in most cases their groups lose access to student activity fee money as well as first claim to low-cost or free university spaces for meetings and worship; they also lose access to standard on-campus recruiting tools, such as activities fairs and bulletin boards, and may lose the right to use the universities’ names.

So if you agree with the secular and liberal elites, you can form a club. But if you disagree with them, you can’t. Either way, you pay them your money.

You may also find this column by conservative professor Mike Adams to be of interest. He replies to a concerned parent who wants to know how bad secularism and leftism really are on campus.

3 thoughts on “North Carolina passes bill to prohibit discrimination against religious and political groups”

  1. I can guarantee that in the event a Christian, Jew, nontheist, or anyone other than a Muslim attempts to become a leader of an Islamic organization then the university will find a way to stop it. The only thing that leftists fear more than violating the laws of political correct dogma is offending a Muslim.

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  2. Reblogged this on Will S.' Culture War Blog and commented:
    The only problem with this, is that you know some Satanists will use it to set up shop on university and college campuses there…

    I’m sympathetic, but my fear is how this is written. It should grandfather real religion, i.e. Christianity, but not protect false ones like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Wiccanism, or Satanism, etc.

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