A pair of bold proclamations in professional sports perfectly define the double standard in which the right of free speech is viewed in popular culture today. Tim Tebow was often ridiculed for openly sharing his Christian lifestyle and told to keep it to himself. Jason Collins was declared a hero for declaring his homosexuality. What’s worse is that Christians have allowed this to happen.

“Announcing that you’re Christian is like announcing that you like cheeseburgers. Sure, there might be one or two people that will look down on you for eating meat, but on the whole, everyone loves cheeseburgers.” This statement, made by a believer, is a common sentiment among Christians today. Too many Christians in the U.S. don’t recognize that they are not the home team any more. Whether it is through “turn the other cheek” tolerance or simple complacency, believers have done little to shore up the slow erosion of their First Amendment Rights.

Perhaps Christian inaction is due to the nature of the attacks on free speech. The methods are more misdirection than brute force and have succeeded in gradually chipping away the foundation of rights Christians once thought unassailable. Most often the terms “tolerance” and “politically correct” are used by organizations who are systematically clamping down on free speech. Don’t pronounce your faith in Jesus, you might offend somebody.  Call a sin a sin in the school commons and you will likely be accused of using Hate Speech. Colleges and Universities across the U.S. have, intentionally or not, removed the “Free” from “Speech” so that no one is offended.

But there are a few students who are pushing back. Just last March Jacob Dagel, a community college student in Iowa, spoke up. He found that the college was going to pay for students to attend Iowa Governor’s Conference on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth. As a Christian he viewed this as wrong, printed fliers and began to pass them out around the school. But Jacob was quickly confronted by campus security. He was told he was free to practice his first amendment rights…as long as he obtained a permit 10 days in advance and remained in the “Free Speech Zone.” Where in the constitution does it say that you must first obtain a permit to practice free speech? But Jacob was bold. He did seek out this fortress of democracy called the “Free Speech Zone.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be a single table in the Student Center.

Jacob recognized that his rights were being violated and he reached out to Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF Attorneys were able to convince the college that the policies were unconstitutional and should be changed.

Jacob’s case is not unique. On campuses across the country students have begun speak up and take back their rights to religious liberty and free speech, often with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom. If you think your Constitutionally protected free speech rights have been violated, contact us and perhaps we can help insure your voice gets heard.

I can hardly believe it, but it has been nearly 20 years since the Supreme Court handed down the landmark decision in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia and said that public universities who allocate mandatory student fees to student groups must do so on a viewpoint neutral basis.  That’s why I was surprised when yet another student group contacted us for help after a university refused to fund its pro-life event on campus.

Earlier this month, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of Students for Life at Eastern Michigan University.  SFL is hosting the Genocide Awareness Project on campus in April and applied for student fee funding to help pay the costs.  GAP is a traveling photo-mural exhibit which compares the contemporary genocide of abortion to historically recognized forms of genocide.  EMU’s student government refused to provide any funding because it said the event was too “biased,” “controversial,” and “one-sided.”  When SFL pressed the matter, the student government pointed to an EMU policy that prohibits funding for any student event that contains “political or ideological” speech.

It’s hard to fathom any college student speech that doesn’t contain some political or ideological message.  Anyone who has walked around a college campus has seen the variety of advertisements for political and ideological events.  Indeed, EMU does provide funding for political and ideological speech of some student groups, but chose to exclude SFL from funding simply because the event, which contains a pro-life message, was too biased, controversial, and one-sided.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that public universities persist in maintaining these obviously unconstitutional policies.  Last year, Alliance Defending Freedom represented a student group at Texas A&M University after the university denied it funding to bring a socially conservative speaker to campus.  And just a few years ago, we represented the Badger Catholic student group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a student fee lawsuit that lasted several years and reached the highest courts in the nation.

We hope EMU will do the right thing, like Texas A&M did last year, and resolve the lawsuit by removing the restriction on political or ideological speech.  If not, we’re prepared to go to the trenches and secure a lasting legal victory for the free speech of all EMU students.

After over six years of litigation, Mike Adams has won the right to present his retaliation case to a jury of his peers.  Back in 2006, he was denied promotion to full professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.  At the time, he had multiple awards and rave reviews from students for his teaching, he had published more peer-reviewed articles than all but two of his colleagues, and he had a distinguished record of service both on and off campus, culminating in earning UNCW’s highest service award.  But to his colleagues and department chair, all of this was inadequate, even though, for most of them, Dr. Adams’ accomplishments surpassed their own.  So—in a process replete with procedural irregularities, conflicts of interests, and vitriolic criticism of Dr. Adams’ Townhall.com columns and his conservative and Christian beliefs—they denied him the promotion he so richly deserved.

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Adams filed suit because it is unconstitutional for public officials, including UNCW professors and administrators, to retaliate against an employee for expressing his views on critical social and political topics.  And at first, his case faced some difficulties when the district court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect his columns.  But after Dr. Adams appealed, the Fourth Circuit disagreed, and not only did it rule that his columns qualified as protected, private speech, but it also ruled that the UNCW officials could be held personally liable if Dr. Adams ultimately won the case.

The Fourth Circuit then asked the district court to answer one question:  Was there evidence that Dr. Adams lost that promotion because of his columns and the views expressed in them?  And in a decision released last Friday, the district court answered that question with a resounding “yes,” setting the case up for a jury trial:

Here, plaintiff has brought forth evidence from which a reasonable jury could find that his speech was a substantial or motivating factor in the decision to deny [promotion] to plaintiff.  The court need not detail the evidence, but plaintiff has produced evidence which . . . shows the following:  (1) his internal evaluations declined after he began the speech at issue; (2) faculty attempted to stop or alter his speech; (3) the denial of his application to full professor was in temporal proximity to Adams’ columns openly criticizing the University on certain political and social issues; (4) the written comments of the faculty on the [promotion] decision committee show hostility toward plaintiff’s speech; and, (5) a faculty member who had accused plaintiff of harassment was allowed to participate and vote on the plaintiff’s application for promotion.

At trial this fall, a North Carolina jury will hear evidence supporting each of these points, plus several more.  And when it does, we are confident that it will uphold a simple principle articulated by Jordan Lorence:  “No university should refuse promotion to an accomplished professor simply because it disagrees with his religious and political views.”

Like my two earlier posts (here and here), this post will continue to build the case that we should re-conceptualize our educational institutions in terms of worship. But this post will extend the argument by answering the following question: is there a biblical justification for prioritizing the concept of worship and re-evaluating our institutions in terms of worship? The answer is an overwhelming yes.

A good guide to help us reach this answer is Greg Beale’s illuminating book We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry. In it, Beale argues that, what we revere we resemble, either for ruin or for restoration. Although Beale draws on numerous parts of scripture to substantiate this thesis, he primarily emphasizes Isaiah 6:9-10, and its inter-textual echo of Psalm 115:2-6. By telling Israel that it has “dull eyes” and “dim ears” in Isaiah 6, God is obviously judging Israel, but God is doing so by comparing Israel to the actual, physical idols  that really do not have physical hears or physical eyes, as described in Psalm 115. But why this comparison? Because God is judging Israel for its idolatry (a problem emphasized in Isaiah chapters 1-5, see, e.g., Isaiah 2:8). And so how does God judge Israel for idolatry? By turning Israel into the idols that they worship. Just like its idols that have no physical eyes to hear and no physical ears to see, Israel (says God in Isaiah 6) will no longer have spiritual eyes or spiritual ears to perceive God’s word![1] From examples like this, Beale biblically supports the principle that God turns us into what we revere, i.e. what we worship.[2]

Now, if this principle is true, the practical import of worship becomes much more apparent since worship determines what we become. For this reason, we desperately need to unearth the hidden forms of our worship to make sure we aren’t being transformed into idols. For example, on a micro-level, must I not now ask what am I worshiping and how is my current behavior merely reflecting the worship some idol? How am I being transformed subtly into the iPhone I spend all day on or the vacation I yearn for? And on the marco-level, must we not now ask what particular thing(s) is our society revering and how is our society revering these things? In what way(s) is our present culture the reflection of some idol it has worshiped or continues to worship?

But in asking these questions, what are really doing? We are merely perceiving ourselves and our institutions in terms of worship. We are recognizing that worship goes on all around us, that worship determines our character, our values, and our goals, and that we therefore need to think in terms of worship and evaluate things in terms of worship. And could there be any more important place to start this analysis than our educational institutions? The very institutions explicitly committed to shaping citizens’ values and minds? And could our freedoms in these educational institutions serve any more important purpose than to allow for and even model worship of the one true God? This last point is no mere ancillary one. Rather, this point explains why we should expansively protect the freedom to worship in the educational context. It explains why, for example, we should protect the right of Christian student groups to set religious qualifications for their leaders, contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling in CLS v. Martinez. But that is the subject of my next and final post in this series on worship in the educational context.

Recently, our friends at FIRE celebrated a huge victory (along with legal network attorneys Robert Corn-Revere and Cary Wiggins) in obtaining a jury verdict holding Valdosta State University President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for violating student Hayden Barnes’ constitutional rights and awarding him $50,000 in damages.

The saga began back in 2007, when Barnes spoke out against Zaccari’s plans to build two new parking garages on campus at a cost of 30 million dollars, partially funded by student fees.  Barnes voiced his opinion and proposed what he viewed as more environmentally friendly alternatives by posting flyers, sending emails to Zaccari, student and faculty governing bodies, and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, as well as writing a letter to the editor of the VSU student newspaper.  Barnes also wrote to Zaccari to ask for an exemption from the mandatory student fee designated for funding the construction.

Zaccari responded by expelling Barnes from school, without notice or opportunity to be heard, for supposedly being a “clear and present danger” to the school.  The jury found that Zaccari violated Barnes’ rights by doing this and held him personally responsible for it to the tune of $50,000 in damages, payable to Barnes.

While college administrators violating student rights is certainly nothing new, often administrators have been able to avoid personal responsibility for doing so.  But this case represents a warning:  College administrators should no longer assume they can violate student rights with impunity.  Not only can they be held liable in their official capacities as university administrators, they can also be held personally liable for damages.  As more and more legal precedent is built, administrators will have less and less of an excuse for violating clearly established student rights like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and equal protection under the law, and for retaliating against students for exercising those rights, like Hayden Barnes did.  Congratulations to FIRE for a significant victory for the rights of students everywhere!