The Court seems to turn a blind eye toward repeated iterations as a method of evading the clear meaning of the law while remaining in technical compliance (e.g. in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a pattern of extending copyrights by twenty years every other decade was not found to be a violation of the “limited terms” requirement recited in the Constitution).
Sure – which goes back to my earlier hypo. Suppose the Jewish Legal Society balks at admitting a contingent of “Jews for Jesus.” Or suppose that they don’t balk, and the next set of elections finds Jews for Jesus now in charge of the Jewish Legal Society’s projects.
Good point. 
They can balk all they want. If they don’t want it to happen, don’t accept university funding/benefits/whatever here. As I have mentioned, I have seen this happen before. As to your exact example, I don’t think that is one that would need to be worried about - I highly doubt there is a significant contingent of Jews for Jesus at Hastings, not in numbers capable of swinging the JLS’s elections. But even if there was, tough.
Why have a religious group if not for the shared belief? It would be like us forming a Dopers Target Shooting Club, but a bunch of people join who hate guns and think that they should be illegal. What’s the point?
To me it is clear. The state, through its school, is denying funds to a group solely because of its religious belief. I don’t know how much more unconstitutional that can be. ** mswas** is absolutely right. How much longer will it be before the government is telling churches that they must hire gay people?
Your comparison is ridiculous. I joined the Jewish Legal Society because they had interesting speakers, and because I was interested in certain aspects of Judaism. Not belieiving in a religion is not the same as hating it and thinking it should be illegal.
Well, the fact this is clear to you indicates you don’t understand the law. Sorry, but that is the case. The government is perfectly entitled to tell churches they must hire gays (well more accurately that they cannot discriminate against gays in employment decisions) if the church is taking federal or state money or benefits. Don’t want to do that? Don’t take the money.
What laws precisely do you think churches should be exempt from? Just laws regarding equal treatment of gays? What about other equal treatment laws? Why are religious beliefs different? Should an entity that opposes gays on political grounds receive the same exemption? Are some parts of the First Amendment more important than others? Should churches be exempt from drug laws, for example, if they use peyote as a sacrament? If so, on what basis do you define a church? Should Mrs Miggins be exempted from all these laws if she says God comes down and takes possession of her cat and tells her to not hire gays or blacks or Jews or the disabled in her pie shop?
A group can admit members who are interested in an issue without requiring them to hold the same beliefs as leadership, can’t it?
That’s it, in a nut shell. They are not being told they can’t have their club, they just want someone else to pay the bill.
Surely. And even if it admits those who don’t agree, the group as an institution can promote whatever views it wants–it just can’t use them to limit membership to some subset of the student body.
ETA: this is right–
It’s not just making someone else pay the bill–it’s making the students who they’re excluding pay the bill. Presumably, student group funding comes from tuition, or from an activity fee all students pay–so it comes from the entire student body.
I don’t myself think that the school is unreasonable to demand that groups funded by all students are accessible to those students. That’s all I see this rule doing–making it so that groups will not be funded by other students if they won’t let those students join and participate.
Does anyone else think it’s weird that Hastings CLS got along just fine with the school and with gays until they (the three officers of the society, mainly) aligned themselves with the national CLS? And that an expensive, divisive, and distracting lawsuit is preferable to un-aligning themselves?
Well they are law students. You don’t learn about settling out of court till you are a 3L.
But other groups have received recognition, and yet limit their membership to some subset of the student body.
Well, theoretically, if an organization is open to all students, that could happen. But the school has a policy of requiring that organizations be open to all students if they want funding, so that’s a risk they’ll have to take. I don’t see a legal problem with that.
First of all, that doesn’t seem to be what the parties have stipulated in the Ninth Circuit.
Are you arguing the Ninth Circuit is wrong (and that, implicitly, the parties did not stipulate that that hastings has an open membership rule?) If not, I can’t see how your statement is consistent with the ruling, and the stipulation–I hope you can let me know how to resolve the apparent contradiction.
Even if you are correct, I’d love to see a clearer example–one example used by CLS in its brief, and the only one cited in the thread, is the “silenced right” group, which, as you put it,
That doesn’t seem to me to be the same thing–being committed to goals doesn’t have anything to do with lifestyle–I could be “committed” to the goals set out by the leadership of CLS while not meeting them in my own life. That seems to me to be different to the rule CLS imposes–which requires a fundamental lifestyle change (celibacy or changing orientation) in order for gay students to join.
If (on re-reading) the argument is that Hastings doesn’t properly apply its own rule, then I’m confused as to why the answer isn’t “make all groups adhere to the rule.”
Further, (and do correct me if I’m wrong)–but here is a list of the UC hastings student groups. I don’t see any ‘silenced right’ on it. (ditto the “hastings motorcycle riders club,” the “vietnamese-american law society”, and the “hastings democratic caucus”–the other examples from the brief of clubs that do discriminate in membership) .What am I missing? If they don’t exist anymore, isn’t that evidence that hastings is in fact following its stated policy of only recognizing groups that don’t discriminate in membership?
http://www.uchastings.edu/student-services/student-orgs/index.html
They well may be – the list of recognized student organizations came from the school year which prompted the lawsuit.
The stipulation is pretty clear on its face. It may be that the other organizations have gone by the wayside, making that argument moot, and CLS wanted to continue just to address the remaining questions. So, yeah, looks like the contention that other groups did the same thing is dead in the water.
So the remaining questions – what level of scrutiny? The Seventh Circuit applied strict scrutiny to the rule; the Ninth seems to have just found it “viewpoint neutral and reasonable.”
And there’s also the question of the federal Equal Access Act, 20 U.S.C. § 4071. According to the brief for cert, the Second Circuit has apparently held that this law protected the right of a high school religious group to insist that its officers affirm its viewpoints.
Could a straight man join a lesbian club at this school?
Can people be ejected from clubs for various reasons?
Obviously from what we’ve seen in this thread, if the lesbian club wants to get funding from the school, yes.
Sounds like that school is ripe for meme warfare, internet message board invasion style. 
If people who do not fit the ‘values’ of the club people from the other club can just invade their club too. Be a member of both clubs. That’s how you play that situation.
Hey, it’s a good way to meet women.