A Christian Student Was Forbidden To Be Gay on Campus, So He’s Suing
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A Christian conservative student named Andrew Hartzler is suing Oral Roberts University under a Title IX violation.
I have a new piece out today @typeinvestigate and @POLITICOMag. It’s about the experiences of LGBTQ kids at Christian colleges and universities that receive federal funding, and have an exemption from a major federal nondiscrimination law. 1/xhttps://t.co/ap6WkUdDmj
— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) May 20, 2022
Hartzle joined a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Education, asking the court to strike down the religious exemption as a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and of the students’ equal protection rights. The complaint, filed in federal court in Oregon in 2021, recounts vivid details from the initial 33 plaintiffs. One plaintiff alleges authorities at Bob Jones University combed her social media and disciplined her for refusing to disavow her support for LGBTQ rights. A gay man alleges that Union University rescinded his offer of admission after discovering he was engaged to a man; another, who felt called to ministry and enrolled at Fuller Seminary, was expelled after only a few days because he is married to a man. A common theme, according to the complaint, is how school authorities examine students’ social media posts for evidence of their sexual orientation or gender identity, or their support for LGBTQ rights.
The Title IX religious exemption ensures that, despite historic advances in LGBTQ rights over the past decade, religious colleges and universities are not required to change their policies in accordance with those new laws — all while receiving the benefits of taxpayer-subsidized funding. According to the REAP complaint, religious colleges and universities that have the exemption received, in 2018 alone, a collective $4.2 billion in funding from the federal government. Much of this comes in the form of federal student loans and financial aid, but the pandemic brought even more aid as well. Oral Roberts University, for example, also received a $7.3 million award in 2020 under the CARES Act, and another $9.1 million under an Education Stabilization Fund intended to assist schools during the pandemic, according to a federal funding database. Without federal aid, many students could not afford to attend these schools. But to maintain the flow of federal money without the religious exemption, the schools would have to amend their policies, something they claim would eviscerate the Christian character of their institutions.
The REAP lawsuit arrives at a moment when the religious right is experiencing a surge in political power. The movement is poised to claim a major victory in its decades-long fight against abortion, and Republican legislatures and governors across the country are passing anti-LGBTQ laws such as Florida’s hotly debated law dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics, banning LGBTQ books and criminalizing gender-affirming care for trans minors. But the lawsuit challenging the religious exemption represents a potential existential threat to a bedrock of the evangelical movement. Christian schools have trained the thinkers who have promoted and defended a legal strategy that dates back to the 1970s, when the early organizing of the modern religious right centered not on abortion but on shielding Christian K-12 schools and universities from requirements to comply with racial nondiscrimination policies. Christian schools lost the battle on race decades ago, but the core argument they use to perpetuate anti-LGBTQ policies is the same: For a secular government to require Christian educational institutions to comply with civil rights law is an unacceptable violation of their religious beliefs, regardless of the discriminatory impact on the students who attend them.
The Department of Education has never imposed Title IX’s most onerous penalty on any college or university, secular or religious: ending federal funding in the form of student loans and grants, federal research money through the military and the Department of Health and Human Services, GI benefits, and other federal contracts. If the REAP lawsuit were to succeed, universities with the religious exemption could face the same consequences as secular schools for anti-LGBTQ discrimination. (In the meantime, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has opened six investigations into the discrimination claims of REAP clients at Christian colleges and universities.) If Christian schools refuse to comply with Title IX, it could force the government to choose between enforcing the law and ensuring that taxpayer dollars do not fund unlawful discrimination, or letting LGBTQ students’ rights go unprotected, lending implicit government support to a religious view that contravenes established public policy.
Hartzler first learned of the religious exemptions after he graduated. “It didn’t make sense to me because the federal government protects us,” he said. “In my mind, where federal money is used, [the] law should be followed.”
