University Officials Held 'Personally Liable' for Discriminating Against Christians

On Friday, a federal court ruled that officials at the University of Iowa must pay out of their own pockets for discriminating against InterVarsity Christian Fellowship by kicking them off campus, along with other religious student groups. The university deregistered the religious groups after an openly gay man claimed he was unjustly denied a leadership position in another Christian organization that required leaders to follow traditional Christian sexual morality. This morality may be unpopular, but organizations should have the freedom of association to limit their leadership to those who follow their precepts.

"We must have leaders who share our faith," Greg Jao, director of external relations at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, said in a statement. "No group—religious or secular—could survive with leaders who reject its values. We’re grateful the court has stopped the University’s religious discrimination, and we look forward to continuing our ministry on campus for years to come."

In the ruling, Judge Stephanie M. Rose of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, not only found that the university and its officials violated InterVarsity's First Amendment rights to free speech, free association, and the free exercise of religion but she also held university officials personally liable. The officials must pay damages to InterVarsity from their own personal accounts. In handing down the ruling, Rose called the university's actions "ludicrous" and "incredibly baffling."

The university acted against InterVarsity and other religious groups after it deregistered the student group Business Leaders in Christ (BLinC) for its policy of restricting leadership to those who believed in Christian teaching and adhered to Christian sexual morality. BLinC sued the university, claiming the school could not treat BLinC differently from other, non-religious groups.

A judge ordered the school to reregister BLinC, but the school responded by deregistering 37 other organizations, including the Imam Mahdi Organization, the Japanese Students and Scholars Club, the Latter-day Saint Student Association, the Sikh Awareness Club, and Young Americans for Liberty.

In February, Rose ruled in favor of BLinC, granting a nominal $1 in damages. The damages will be a great deal larger in the InterVarsity case.

"It’s rare for a federal judge to call out a public university for ‘ludicrous’ and ‘incredibly baffling’ violations of the First Amendment," Daniel Blomberg, senior counsel at Becket, who represented InterVarsity and BLinC, told Fox News. "But it was necessary here. The court already told the University of Iowa to stop picking on one Christian student group. The University responded by doubling down and kicking out Christian, Muslim and Sikh groups. That was obviously wrong. And it’s even more clearly wrong once you consider, as the court did, that it was also unfair."

This ruling upholding InterVarsity's religious freedom and freedom of association follows the historic ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado commission had engaged in unlawful religious discrimination against a Christian baker who refused to craft a custom cake for a same-sex wedding. Government officials had compared the baker's beliefs to the Nazis.

Also last week, a district court judge in Michigan granted a preliminary injunction protecting a Catholic adoption agency from discriminatory state action. That agency had refused to certify same-sex couples and single people for adoption.

The LGBT movement has become overzealous in efforts to prevent discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. These people deserve equal rights, but they do not have the right to silence dissenters or to force conservative religious believers to violate their consciences.

Conservative Christian organizations still have the right to restrict leadership to people who believe their doctrines and follow their moral codes.

The well-documented animus against conservative Christians referred to as Christianophobia helps explain the likely motivations behind these officials at the University of Iowa. Rather than merely accepting that BLinC had the right to choose its own members, the officials revoked the standing of dozens of other groups. Now it seems the chickens will be coming home to roost.

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UNC System Grads Carry Less Student Debt

Most students rely on loans to pay for college; colleges raise their prices, and student debt increases. Now, about 44 million students collectively owe $1.6 trillion in student debt.

In North Carolina, at least, graduates carry less debt than their peers. North Carolina ranks 37th in the country for total debt levels of its graduates, with the average student holding $26,526 in debt upon graduation.

And the average graduate from a University of North Carolina school holds $25,433 in student debt, less than the state average.

North Carolina’s flagship institution, UNC-Chapel Hill, is best at keeping debt proportions low—only 40 percent of its graduates have some form of debt. But at other UNC schools, the picture changes. Most UNC graduates carry some debt, and over 80 percent of graduates from NC A&T, UNC-Greensboro, and UNC-Pembroke leave with debt.

Western Carolina University students hold the least amount of debt per student in the UNC system, with the average student holding $15,669 in debt. This may be in part due to the new NC promise tuition plan, which offers a flat tuition rate of $500 per semester at Western Carolina, Elizabeth City State University, and UNC-Pembroke. The NC Promise plan is funded by $51 million from the state legislature and has resulted in enrollment increases of 14 percent at UNC-P, 6 percent at WCU, and 19 percent at ECSU.

Students are not entirely to blame for taking on so much debt; only wealthy students can afford to pay tuition and fees without loans. The federal government perpetuates this problem by offering easy loans, along with colleges who load students with debt for degrees that don’t provide them with the skills necessary to repay the loans. Parents are also complicit for not teaching their children to think about how much debt is too much.

The current political solutions to address this debt problem are not sufficient. So far, they have ignored how colleges and the government make student debt worse and tend to be “quick fixes,” such as wealth redistribution. Politicians on the left promote proposals to force the federal government to pay for existing student debt by taxing individual and institutional savings, and politicians on the right ignore the issue entirely.

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Single-sex schools get top marks

Stephanie Bennett

GIRLS' schools could be the key to closing the gender pay gap, with a Queensland study finding female students graduated more confident and more likely to hold leadership roles if they attend single-sex schools.

University of Queensland Business School gender equality expert Terrance Fitzsimmons' research into how subtle differences in raising boys and girls could set up a lifetime of inequality at work included surveying more than 10,000 boys and girls at 13 single-sex schools across Queensland.

With the gender pay gap at 14 per cent and the number of female CEOs at the top of ASX-listed companies falling, Dr Fitzsimmons said ensuring girls graduate school with as much self-confidence as boys could be a key component to tackling inequality.

"Studies in this area always show that overall, men are more confident than women and that starts changing in late childhood —up until about the age of eight, it's the same," he said.

But the research found when attending single-sex schools, boys and girls had equal levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy in their senior years. Dr Fitzsimmons said this was a crucial finding, given the development of self-confidence and the non-selection of STEM subjects by female high school students had both been found to be major contributors to workplace gender inequality.

"In single-sex schools, girls are surrounded by female role models in leadership positions, such as principals. Any stereotypes that boys are better at maths or science—which often can't help but play on some teachers' minds and may lead girls to dropping subjects simply don't exist."

Girls were also more likely to continue to play team sports into their senior years at single-sex schools. "There's definitely something in this whether we go the whole way, there's no doubt there's an effect and we should be looking at these things strategically," he said, adding that even single-sex classrooms could potentially prove beneficial.

Brisbane Girls Grammar School principal Jacinda Euler said "confidence isn't, nor should it be, gendered". "However, as a school that educates girls, we focus specifically on nurturing girls' self-confidence and independence in a supportive environment," she said.

The above is an article from the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 6 Oct., 2019