In California, it means stripping university students of any competing religious club – especially Christian.
When Cal Poly Sal Luis Obispo hosts its annual Open House this April, during which campus clubs typically greet and recruit prospective visiting students, one longtime mainstay at the university will be conspicuously absent: Cru.
The Christian club will not be allowed to set up a table and pass out fliers, or meet and greet guests. It’s the same at Chico State, where Cru will not be allowed to showcase itself during the school’s annual fall recruitment drive. They’ve also been forbidden from hanging up posters in freshman dorms.
Gone are the days when Christian student clubs at Cal Poly Sal Luis Obispo, Chico State – and the other 21 Cal State universities across California – are allowed to set up shop in the quad and recruit.
This school year, CSU administrators labeled campus Christian groups that refuse to allow non-Christians to lead them “discriminatory.” As a result, Christian clubs at Cal State universities that refused to change their constitutions and check boxes saying they would allow non-Christians as leaders have been officially derecognized by their campus communities.
They’ve been scrubbed from campus websites and directories. They cannot take part in events that help campus clubs recruit new members and gain visibility. They are charged a more expensive, outsider fee to rent rooms on campus – straining their already tight coffers. They’ve lost a chance to receive a portion of student fees collected to help clubs on campuses thrive. […]
“The effects of [the policy] severely reduced the ability of Christians and other religions on campus to practice their faith and be an integral part of the CSU community,” said engineering senior Matt Susank. “Not only does that speak against the mission at Cal Poly but of higher education and it is in a way discriminatory towards our ability to do that which is a huge part of campus life.”
[…]
Leaders of Cru, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ, as well as the two other Christian clubs at San Luis Obispo that were derecognized – prayerInterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Chinese Christian Fellowship – have insisted that they couldn’t allow any non-Christians to be leaders.
“We have no issue with anybody of any kind of race, religion coming to our weekly meetings and being a part of who we are,” San Luis Obispo Missionary Leader Jamey Pappas said. “It’s a question of who’s going to be leading our students in a Bible Study, mentoring them individually, or deciding what kind of content goes into our weekly meeting, and we want people who agree with what we’re about.”
Chico State’s Otto told The College Fix to stay instated they would have had to change their constitution and check boxes saying they agree with the new all-comers policy, titled “Executive Order 1068.”
“As a faith-based organization, there are things within our constitution that we feel strongly in order to preserve our message and in order to do what we feel called to do,” Otto said. “Our leaders have to not only be able to execute these roles, but also live them out in certain ways.”
Greg Jao, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s national field director, said that the message the executive order sends to religious organizations is troubling.
“This is a government actor reaching directly into the leadership function of a religious organization and telling us what the criteria religious organizations should use,” Jao told The College Fix. “And that’s pretty unprecedented.”
Why not?
For the Left all questions of life are to be resolved by The State and the Anointed Dear Leaders who know better than you do how to run your life.
Get used to it, Skippy, if America’s rulers don’t give a fig about Christians and Jews being slaughtered by Islamofascists, what makes you think they care about all you icky god-botherers at home?
That First Amendment is SOOOOOO over 100 years old.
Is the Pope Catholic?
yes
That is so discriminatory
So does the Neopagan Gaia Circle have to agree to let non-neopagans serve as leaders?
Sue the CSU chancellor and trustees into oblivion. If the body that issued my bachelor’s degree becomes a historical footnote the degree might finally be worth something to me.
Yes. But undoubtedly the Neopagan Gaia Circle has taken steps to insure that prospective non-neopagans are properly vetted* so that no non-neopagan will ever actually serve. As long as it’s theoretically possible, it’s all good.
Silly Christers with their old-fashioned integrity.
*the process will almost certainly involve a goat in some way, shape, manner or form.
FIRE needs to get on this. A clearer case of “viewpoint discrimination” cannot be found.
I’m sure it’d be perfectly fine if I joined the campus Muslims for Palestine group, and spent the meetings eating ham sandwiches, playing certain Stephen Crowder videos on my phone, and making comical fart noises during the call to prayer.
John
I just wish there was enough Christians willing to go all subversive … get a large enough group together to show up at a club – Pagans R Us, Non-binary Trans, etc — and take over by voting in Christian leaders and changing the club.
I almost wish I was back in college to organize such a thing.
[…] Protein WisdomThis school year, CSU administrators labeled campus Christian groups that refuse to allow non-Christians to lead them “discriminatory.” As a result, Christian clubs at Cal State universities that refused to change their constitutions and check boxes saying they would allow non-Christians as leaders have been officially derecognized by their campus communities.The appropriate response to this is for every member of the Christian clubs that have been subjected to this requirement to immediately seek to join all the other clubs — the black club, the hispanic club, the non-heterosexual club, the women's club — and vote, en-mass, to elect to leadership roles someone from their own group who does not meet the relevant qualification.The howls of outrage will likely be audible from orbit, because it's easy to put a rule in place that insists you check a box on a form in order to have the support of the campus administration when you know that rule will only be applied to your enemies. It's nothing more than doing what Alinsky advised in Rule 4: Make them live up to their own rules. […]