Many quality private schools have a religious basis, but that doesn’t mean they are the kind of place that kick out a child based on her parents behavior. Now if there was no way her parents could have seen the potential for this kind of problem then I would have to retract my statement, but I find that unlikely. If I had children with a same sex partner I would look very carefully at any school that called itself ‘Christian’ before I enrolled my child there. I believe that Catholic schools wouldn’t expel a student in that situation, although they may often tell that girl her parents are sinners going to hell. There are a number of other quality religious institutions who would have no problem with the children of same sex parents attending. So unless someone can show me that the parents of that girl exerted a reasonable effort in determining that this school would be accepting of their lifestyle then I will continue to contend that they are idiots…
ETA: there’s already a GoFundMe. Supposedly it’s just for school activities but it was set up this week and shared on their Facebook page in the middle of discussion of this story.
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… unless of course they were smart enough to see this as a way to raise money based on the manufactured indignation.
Oh, just wait ten minutes, and someone will set up a kickstarter fund that raises a million bucks, and a new hashtag will pop up, and there will be Facebook memes and all the usual bullshit on both sides.
I don’t think the school should be allowed to kick the kid out. I consider sexual orientation to be a protected class, and I think it is in California already, so I’m against even private schools like this to be able to kick out kids for having gay parents.
But the kid wasn’t rejected because she’s homosexual, she was rejected because of her parents. The protected classification would be “parental sexual orientation” or something like that.
California is in the Ninth Circuit, which already applies heightened scrutiny to sexual orientation claims. So this would be a wasted effort.
Even assuming that sexual orientation is a protected classification, a purely private religious school can teach whatever they want and exclude whomever they want without justification and without oversight. They can teach that women must be submissive to men or simply refuse to enroll women (such as ultra-orthodox yeshivas). They could teach that one race is superior or refuse to enroll members of certain races. Slippery slope arguments aside, any change to that would require reversal of decades of Supreme Court precedent on this subject which is pretty entrenched. I guess the parents could try to file a lawsuit but it would probably be tossed in short order.
As I understand Christian doctrine, refusing to enroll the children of sinners would result in an empty school, but they can do whatever they want. I can conclude they are jerks, but they aren’t likely to care what I think and I wouldn’t want anything to do with them either, which I guess is the whole point of having rules like that in the first place.
Yes, that is correct. The only area that private schools must adhere to with regards to discrimination is race. Even wholly private schools cannot discriminate based on race. SCOTUS in 1976 in Runyon v. McCrary
They probably can if their racial discrimination is based in religious belief, or at least Runyon didn’t decide that question:
[QUOTE=From Runyon Decision]
It is worth noting at the outset some of the questions that these cases do not present. They do not present any question of the right of a private social organization to limit its membership on racial or any other grounds. They do not present any question of the right of a private school to limit its student body to boys, to girls, or to adherents of a particular religious faith, since 42 U.S.C. 1981 is in no way addressed to such categories of selectivity. They do not even present the application of 1981 to private sectarian schools that practice racial exclusion on religious grounds.
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Alternatively, construe school vouchers as a form of federal funding and all of the protections that attach could be enforced. Requiring people to pay for education does not necessarily mean that government be the only provider.
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
That’s a good point. Shodan wants to know if the parents were “setting up” the school. I want to know if the school was setting up the parents.
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Setting up the parents by rejecting the daughter so that other people would GoFundME for their tuition somewhere else? That seems a little far-fetched, but I suppose it is possible. It would surprise me that a fundamentalist school would go to the trouble for a lesbian couple. But no doubt it could happen.