In a San Francisco Chronicle article titled “Court says private school can expel lesbians” writer Bob Egelko summarizes a state appeals court decision that ruled in favor of California Lutheran High School, the defendant, citing that the school’s expulsion of two female students on the grounds that the two had been romantically engaged did not violate California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination of all business enterprises on the basis of race, color, religion, ancestry, nationality, sexual orientation, sex, and disability. Here the court ruled that because the school is a private, religious school whose funding comes primarily from its members, with only minor revenue coming from the sale of school paraphernalia and tickets, it did not qualify as a business enterprise and therefore it was not legally culpable for potential acts of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender.
Understanding that the majority of private schools are considered to be not-for-profit organizations, one of the things I found interesting about this article is that it lays out the State’s inability, at least in situations where no universal illegalities are occurring, to exert remedial authority in private economies. While the State outlaws certain practices that are religiously justified, the obvious being polygamy, the State only partially outlaws discrimination so that gender discrimination in employment, which the school justifies religiously, goes unchecked, leading to what is arguably gender bias in disciplinary action and ending in the expulsion of these two female students based on their sexual orientation. Understanding where and why the government flexes and withholds its authority when legality and religious principle intersect allows insight into where our national conscious rests on a variety of social issues, like discrimination and homosexuality.
As a secondary note, I think it’s interesting that the article implies that the school’s right to freedom of expression would have been compromised under a Civil Right’s law when, in fact, the judges refused to comment on this claim in the opinion. The fact that the issue of gender discrimination as religiously justified is never mentioned unless the reader follows the link to the ruling points to the media saliency of issues of sexual orientation for the state of
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