Friend:

Jackson, Mississippi, closed its public pools rather than desegregate. Prince Edward County, Virginia, did the same with its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis refused to issue any marriage licenses just to deny same-sex couples their constitutional right to marry. Yeshiva University took a page from this same playbook last week, suspending all student clubs rather than comply with a court order to recognize an LGBTQ student club.

This scorched-earth approach has a long and dark history, one that’s disturbingly tied up in disingenuous claims of religious freedom. YU, like Davis in Kentucky, sought to cloak its discrimination in claims of religious freedom. It is seeking to reforge this core American principle into a sword that harms others, rather than respecting it as the shield that protects everyone’s right to live as themselves and believe as they choose.

For those who haven’t been following the news, Pride Alliance, the LGBTQ student club that Yeshiva refuses to recognize, sued the university for violating New York City’s Human Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. The ongoing fight in the lower courts has been about whether YU qualifies as a public accommodation under the law.

Instead of continuing to litigate that legal question through the state courts, Becket Fund, an active and well-funded member of the billion-dollar shadow network of religious extremists we’ve been warning you about, appealed right to the U.S. Supreme Court on the shadow docket (a fitting name).

Becket argued that YU should be exempt from the human rights law because of its Modern Orthodox Jewish beliefs, even though it receives public funding and is chartered as a secular educational institution, not a religious organization—something the university acknowledged more than 25 years ago, when its own attorneys said it wasn’t eligible for a religious exemption from the nondiscrimination law.

In a move that had everything to do with procedure and nothing to do with the merits of the religious freedom question, the Supreme Court refused to intervene on YU’s behalf last week, over the objections of four ultra-conservatives on the Court. (We’re not hopeful the 5-4 vote will be the same when or if the question of whether religious freedom can justify discrimination returns to the Court.)

In response, YU abruptly announced it was shutting down all student clubs.

Remarkably, Pride Alliance demonstrated more care for the students than the administration did: The club announced this week it wouldn’t force YU to comply with the court order to recognize the club while the litigation is ongoing: “We do not want YU to punish our fellow [classmates] by ending all student activities while it circumvents its responsibilities. YU is attempting to hold all of its students hostage while it deploys manipulative legal tactics, all in an effort to avoid treating our club equally.”

I hope the selfless gesture of these brave students changes YU’s heart and that the university opts to treat all students—including LGBTQ students—equally. Religious freedom is not a license to discriminate. And a university that proclaims an affiliation with a historically marginalized religion should understand better than most that misusing religious freedom to justify discrimination against one group of people will lead to it being used to discriminate against others—including religious and racial minorities.

Moving our country backward by shredding civil rights protections in the name of religious liberty threatens freedom and equality for all of us. That will harm Yeshiva and Judaism far more than supporting a small group of LGBTQ students ever could.

In solidarity,

Rachel K. Laser
President and CEO