A lawsuit against the University of Iowa blurs the line between religious freedom and separation of church and state.
A group of students at the University of Iowa, Business Leaders in Christ, has sought to establish a sanctioned relationship in the university to promote the group’s particular religious convictions. Found by the university to be in violation of the UI Human Rights Policy drafted in compliance with the Iowa Civil Right Act, the group has been denied such a relationship.
The sticking point being the student organization’s discriminatory ban of full participation of anyone disposed to enter into a same-sex relationship — such individuals are prohibited from holding a leadership position in the organization. The president of the group, Jacob Estell, stated in apparent echo of some Washington-based legal counsel by Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, “Our beliefs weren’t made by us, and they can’t be changed by us, either.” To wit, some equal protection of the law is more equal than some other equal protection of the law.
Given the long history of human suffering and loss of freedom that has come when religion and government have gotten entangled, one member of the various faithful, yours as truly as I can be, believes that equal protection is best served by keeping matters of faith and governance as separate as they can officially be.
President Thomas Jefferson, in an 1802 letter in response to some Danbury Baptist’s concerns that, via government, others might try to deprive them of their religious freedom, wrote affirming in no uncertain terms that their freedom of faith was constitutionally protected by the First Amendment. The wording that Jefferson used has passed down as an assurance of “a wall of separation between church and state.”
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Later, by the adoption of one of the “Civil War Amendments” (the Fourteenth), it was made clear that this safeguard from interference also extended down through all other levels of government — of which the University of Iowa is part and parcel, and by legal intent prevented from being used in furtherance of someone’s religious purposes.
However, via exercise of one’s freedom of speech, an individual may proselytize to his faithful heart’s content in any public space, provided he neither unduly disturbs the peace nor disrupts the purpose to which some institutional setting has been legally established. Thus, an individual’s faith is protected and left as a private concern, not a matter of government promotion or elimination.
Given the array of private musings of those that with certainty can contend to have seen into the private depths of their immortal souls and viewed the absolute, ultimate, universal, perpetual, and irrefutable light of truth; reason suggests that others left somewhat in the dark are not likely to soon, if ever, see it the same way. True, though differing all of us cannot be right; each and every one of us is free to be wrong in our own special way.
If people have need to express their special way to others, they might best serve tolerance of religious freedom for themselves and all others by expressing themselves in harmony with the sentiment Thomas Paine penned in forward to his Age of Reason. Paine wrote:
“… my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason.”
– Sam Osborne
University of Iowa 1959 and 1967 graduate
