A Legitimate Entity Deserves Legitimate Funding

In Paying a Price for Bias , Inside Higher Ed reports that a Baptist university in Kentucky lost state money for a pharmacy school after the state’s supreme court ruled against them, in a case brought by a homosexualist lobby group.  It would be nice if a conscientiously held moral view, almost universally held in this country and enshrined in law until recently, were not dismissed as “bias,” meaning not just a tilt of mind but prejudice or bigotry.

In an e-mail to me responding to the story, Hadley Arkes wrote:

And so the hard point here is: If it is indeed legitimate for a university to retain its religious character—if it is a legitimate entity, if it is committed to nothing that is illegitimate in the eyes of the law—there surely could be nothing wrong with a school of pharmacy generated by the same school. The question for the court is just why it should be unconstitutional for the government to support a school of pharmacy under a religious school while the government funds the same kinds of schools under the auspices of schools without a religious character. It has seemed to me in the past that this kind of a situation creates a disability distinctly based on religion, and I wish the school would contest it.

Dr. Arkes has an article appearing in the next issue on a very similar subject, the Supreme Court and the Christian Legal Services’ desire that their university treat them the same as other groups . And his new and much anticipated book C onstitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (Cambridge University Press) will be published in June .