Last October, Angela McCaskill, chief diversity officer at Gallaudet University, the nation’s premier university for the deaf, was placed on administrative leave for signing a Maryland petition to protect marriage.  We wrote to Gallaudet and expressed our serious concern about the many laws the university broke by punishing an employee for clearly protected speech.  After three months on leave, and with her employment uncertain, Gallaudet announced this week that McCaskill is back on the job.

The university correctly reinstated McCaskill, but we are troubled that the university let this drag on so long.  Several years ago, San Francisco State University conducted a seven-month investigation of several college students for sponsoring a speech event on campus.  The university eventually dropped the investigation, but it had already chilled the students’ free speech.  A federal court later enjoined the policy that allowed the university to investigate dubious charges.  No doubt, Gallaudet has accomplished the same result by suspending McCaskill for three months after she engaged in a constitutionally protected activity.  If Gallaudet had been a public university, McCaskill would have a strong First Amendment retaliation claim.  But even though it’s not, Gallaudet was close to breaking several federal and state laws.  We hope McCaskill won’t be dissuaded from expressing her personal beliefs in the future, and we caution that public universities should not follow Gallaudet’s speech-chilling example.

History is happening this week in Atlanta that will change the world.  This week, 60,000 young people are assembling at the Georgia Dome in downtown Atlanta for the Passion 2013 conference, led by Louie Giglio. One of my daughters is there, along with other young people from my church in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as young people from all over the U.S. and many nations.

The Passion conferences started in 1997, and this is the largest one to date.  I have heard about the serious Christian intensity at the Passion conferences, so I have watched several sessions from the live Internet stream, and it is amazing.  Having Chris Tomlin lead a stadium full of young people in worshiping Christ impacts even those watching remotely.    I have watched the powerful teaching of Louie Giglio, Francis Chan and others and realize that something big is going on.   One focus of the event is to work to end slavery and human trafficking in the world.  Social action borne in the hearts of young people by strong Biblical teaching and devotion to the living Christ can transform the world.

The conference runs through early Friday afternoon, and I urge you to tune into some of the sessions and watch.  John Piper, the great preacher and writer from Minneapolis and Desiring God Ministries, will be preaching Thursday night.  You can also review the past sessions at the Passion 2013 website. You will be encouraged.  Take the time to watch this move of God as it happens.

It has become commonplace to observe that law and politics are “downstream” from culture.  In other words, our laws, generally speaking, are shaped and driven by the culture rather than the other way around.  To be sure, law often solidifies cultural trends, but it rarely creates, drives, or shapes them.  This relationship between culture and law came to mind a few times during the comparatively quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

The first occurred when my family and I played Hasbro’s “The Game of Life.”  Both my wife and I had enjoyed playing the game as children and thought it would be good fun for our family.  So we bought the new version, complete with the iPad app.  In case you’re not familiar with Life (as it’s called), the object of the game is to retire with the most money.  As each player winds his way through a simulated life, he makes decisions (e.g., pursuing a career immediately or going to college first) and encounters events (e.g., getting sued or winning the lottery).  Those decisions and events have financial consequences, and the iPad app keeps track of each player’s progress.  The game requires each player to get married.  My 11 year-daughter was the first to hit the “get married now” square on the game board.  She had previously “told” the iPad app that she was a girl, and she put a little pink peg in the driver’s seat of her car/game piece.  The app gave her a choice of spouses — a male or a female.  I suspected that there was more to this than a software quirk, and I was right.  Apparently, the original iPad app reflected the natural and traditional understanding of marriage, pairing players with opposite-sex spouses. But, predictably, that generated complaints.  It appears as though the game’s manufacturers responded to those complaints, disconnecting the app’s understanding of marriage from its real and natural definition.  That, in turn, generated counter-complaints, which had no effect. The game’s manufacturer picked a side.  All would agree that its choice would have been almost unthinkable a decade or two ago.

The second occurred when I was catching up on some scholarly reading, namely Entertainment Weekly‘s year-end issue.  One article was entitled, “This Was The Year That . . . Everyone Came Out in Parenthetical.”  The essential message of the piece was that when certain celebrities (e.g., CNN’s Anderson Cooper) announced that they were homosexual, there wasn’t much of a reaction.  The article’s first sentence nicely sums up its point:  “Some revolutions make headlines because they don’t make headlines.”  The article’s final paragraph resonates with my point about the relationship between culture and law:

The Hollywood closet isn’t going away, nor is antigay prejudice–although, happily, that’s being shoved into a closet of its own.  But it’s a measure of how well the entertainment industry has pioneered this issue, and how far we’ve come, that our focus is shifting to fields–sports and politics–in which bigoted rhetoric is slower to disappear.  EW has been covering this subject since 1990, and we’re not close to the end of the story yet. But as Churchill once said (not about gay people), it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Note that phrases like “antigay prejudice” and “bigoted rhetoric,” as understood by liberal Entertainment Weekly writers, include support for the natural and traditional definition of marriage.

The Game of Life and Entertainment Weekly are both part of “the culture” that drives and shapes law and politics.  And the shifting cultural consensus about homosexual behavior and the definition of marriage has profound consequences for the religious freedom of individuals and organizations.  Threats to their freedom don’t come out of the blue; the ongoing attack on marriage didn’t start with the introduction of legislation or the filing of lawsuits designed to alter the legal definition of marriage.  And the objective of these efforts is not simply to secure legal approval of homosexual conduct; it is to punish and marginalize those embrace the traditional understanding of marriage and sexual morality.  As the EW writer declares, such individuals and organizations are “being shoved into a closet of [their] own.”  Indeed.  This means that our longstanding national commitment to religious freedom will continue to be severely tested in the coming year, as cultural trends translate into legal and political efforts to push traditional religious believers “into a closet of their own.”

We have a lot to be thankful for this year at Alliance Defending Freedom as our clients prevailed time and again in cases across the country.  Here’s a recap of the top university victories in 2012:

Julea Ward – As Jeremy wrote recently, Julea Ward scored a big victory when she settled her case against Eastern Michigan University.  Her case shows that the freedom to believe is still a critical component of our constitutional liberties.  As Jeremy said, the appellate court ruling in her favor “will have a lasting impact on the right of college students to live out their lives according to the dictates of their faith.  It clearly sets out that public universities ‘cannot compel students to alter or violate their belief systems . . . as the price for obtaining a degree,’ which is precisely what EMU was demanding Julea do.”

OSU Student Alliance – The Ninth Circuit handed down a resounding victory for independent student press on college campuses in OSU Student Alliance v. Ray.  Public universities cannot relegate these papers to second-class status and expect to get away with it.  This case will continue in 2013, so watch for updates.

Bronx Household of Faith – While not technically a university case, several Alliance Defending Freedom university lawyers are working on this case to protect equal access to government facilities.  New York City has a no-worship policy that it is trying to use to block a church from renting its facilities after school hours, like all other community groups can.  A federal district court struck down the policy in June, finding that it violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.  This case is more than a decade old and was recently argued to the federal appellate court in New York City, so stay tuned for what happens next.

Florida Christian College – Just last month, Florida Christian College settled its suit against the State of Florida over a tuition grant program.  The state refused to allow FCC students to participate in the tuition grant because the state viewed FCC as “non-secular” and “too religious.”  In other word, FCC students lost out on the tuition assistance, while everyone else did not.  That is no longer the case.

Texas Aggie Conservatives – A group of conservative students at Texas A&M University thought it was unfair that they could not access student organization funding simply because they were part of a political group, but virtually all other student groups could access those funds.  They sued A&M and got the university to remove its discriminatory ban on funding religious and political student groups.

Young Americans for Freedom – Another group of conservative students, this time in Florida, were restricted from distributing flyers on campus.  They successfully settled their case this year, which enabled spontaneous student speech, removed speech zones on campus, and limited a college speech code.

Nationwide Letter Campaign – We also sent letters to over a hundred public universities from coast to coast detailing unconstitutional speech policies on their campuses.  As of today, we received 27 favorable responses indicating that those universities revised their policies to protect student speech.

Aside from these critical wins, we were successful countless other times in situations you may never hear about.  But those victories were just as critical for preserving the religious liberty of the individuals involved in them, and for that we are thankful.

We hope and pray that 2013 brings more victories for student speech on campus.

Santa came early this year for students at some public universities.  FIRE released its annual survey of free speech on campus this week and reports that for the fifth year in a row, unconstitutional policies at public universities have diminished in number.  According to the report, five years ago 79% of public college maintained clearly unconstitutional speech policies.  For 2013, that number has dropped to 61%.  This is a tremendous decline in only five years and shows that efforts by FIRE, Alliance Defending Freedom, and allied organizations are have a huge impact (Alliance Defending Freedom launched its team of university lawyers in 2006).

But the Grinch remains a strong foe of student speech, with three-fifths of universities still stifling student speech.  For example, one hundred percent of schools in Illinois and Wisconsin received a “red light” rating, which indicates the school has a student policy that violates the Constitution.  Over the past 6 years, Alliance Defending Freedom has filed multiple lawsuits in Wisconsin alone.  By contrast, in Virginia, 37% of universities received a green light rating.  (Alliance Defending Freedom scored a victory earlier this year when Virginia Tech agreed to remove an unconstitutional student fee policy.)

FIRE’s report shows that advocates of religious liberty and free speech are making headway at public universities.  But there is much more work to be done across the country and Alliance Defending Freedom cannot do anything without students who are willing to speak up for their rights.  We hope you will speak up with us in 2013.