Anti-Gay Groups Gear Up To Fight A 30-Year-Old Supreme Court Victory Over Racism

[KamaAina]

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/05/21/3661246/anti-gay-groups-gear-fight-30-year-old-supreme-court-victory-racism/

Bob Jones University was a racist institution. Until 1971, the school did not accept black students at all, and for much of the 1970s, the school only permitted African Americans who were married to another African American to attend. After a court decision required many Southern schools to integrate, Bob Jones changed its policy again to allow unmarried black students, while also imposing strict restrictions on interracial romance. “Students who date outside of their own race will be expelled,” read one of Bob Jones’s rules. Another provided that “Students who are members of or affiliated with any group or organization which holds as one of its goals or advocates interracial marriage will be expelled.”

At the beginning of the 1970s, a panel of federal judges and, ultimately, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) concluded that the federal government could “no longer legally justify allowing tax-exempt status to private schools which practice racial discrimination.” What followed was a foundational conflict that helped build the modern day Christian right. According to a top aide to Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, “government interference in Christian schools” quickly became one of religious conservatives’ core causes. Though not all of the culture warriors who signed up in defense of religious education were racist — many were motivated by opposition to evolution, sex education or “hedonistic youth culture” — the bigoted Bob Jones University soon became the battleground where the Christian Right made its stand. ...

Flash forward more than three decades, and the Christian right is gearing up to fight this battle all over again, albeit on a slightly different battlefield. This time, the forces of religious discontent are not mustering in support of racism, they’re mustering in favor of anti-gay discrimination....

This question was largely unnoticed by mainline Court reporters, but it set off an earthquake in the conservative press. The Weekly Standard’s Terry Eastland labeled this exchange between Alito and Verrilli as “[t]he most notable exchange during the argument last month in the same-sex marriage case before the Supreme Court.” Though Verrilli’s answer to Alito’s question was non-committal — Verrilli told the justice that he can’t “answer that question without knowing more specifics” while acknowledging that the question of anti-gay schools’ non-profit status is “certainly going to be an issue” — the National Review’s Ed Whelan wrote that the possibility that government may no longer provide tax-preferred status to colleges that discriminate may be “the next step in progressive totalitarianism.” Michael Farris, the chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association claimed in a USA Today op-ed that “Colleges and universities that receive federal funding will be coerced into immediate compliance,” while “[a]ccreditation agencies will ratchet up their bullying of Christian institutions.”

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

[rusty fender]

1. Why would any non-white person want to attend this POS "university" in the first place?

Same goes for the gays...

[Behind the Aegis]

2. Just demonstrates how civil rights often overlap.

The same arguments used against interracial marriages (marriage between AA people way back) are similar, some are the same, used against GLB people! Bigots are often lazy and reach back into their sanitized histories and reuse bigotry. At least they are recycling, right? Maybe we should let them know that and they will stop because recycling is a "liberal" value.