For the final post of my oddly 21-day “week” of guest posting for the Brandeis Center blog, I want to focus on a troubling trend on college campuses which prevents belief-based organizations from excluding people hostile to their core beliefs. I talk about this trend in detail and at length in my book, and for now, the threat mostly concerns evangelical Christian groups on college campuses. For my nearly 12 year career, I have watched universities come up with different rationales for kicking evangelical Christian students off campus, primarily because of evangelicals views on sexual morality and topics like gay rights and marriage equality. I admit to have been surprised by how common this was on campus before I started at FIRE in 2001, but fighting these attempts on campus has become a regular part of my job. You can see a long list of creative approaches to punish religious groups on the religious liberty section of FIRE’s website. After years of trying different approaches to punish Christian groups, campus administrators seem to have settled upon one strategy spearheaded by the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. Despite the fact that it was clear from the record that Hastings wanted to exclude the Christian Legal Society from campus because of the content of its “statement of faith,” which included a belief in traditional marriage and sexual abstinence outside of marriage, Hastings argued that CLS was denied recognition because it “discriminated” on the basis of belief. I put “discriminated” in quotes because usually, when we think of discrimination, we think of invidious discrimination on the basis of some immutable characteristic or status. Meanwhile, one would expect that a belief-based organization would have the right to exclude those who do not share the beliefs of the group. As we at FIRE often say, a Muslim group has a right to be Muslim, a Jewish group as a right to be Jewish, an atheist group has a right to be atheist, and a Christian group has a right to be Christian. But in 2010, the Supreme Court, in a muddled, in my judgment, deeply wrong opinion in CLS. v. Martinez, decided that the university could have a policy that meant all belief-based organizations have to be open to “all comers.” And, yes, this would mean that liberal groups would have to admit conservatives, Muslim groups would have to admit atheists, and, as stated in my title, pro-Israel groups would have to admit anti-Semites and those who believe Israel has no right to exist. Perhaps because universities realize that this policy may be too difficult to actually enforce, and perhaps because religious groups and FIRE have pushed back against the absurdities of “all comers” policies, colleges around the country have been somewhat hesitant to adopt them. Vanderbilt, a large private research university in Tennessee, had no such reservations, and continues to maintain its “all comers” policy inspired by the Supreme Court and Hastings Law School. A total of thirty Christian groups were affected by the new policy; seventeen reluctantly adopted the new policy, two opted to operate off campus, and eleven were derecognized. Here’s a short video about the ongoing case at Vanderbilt: While I feel compelled to mention that I am both an atheist and someone who deeply believes in gay rights, I also believe that the trend of de-recognizing Christian groups because what they believe about homosexuality (and it overwhelmingly tends to be evangelical Christian groups, not the other faiths that share the very same beliefs about sexual morality) is a terrible one for pluralism on campus. As I write in my book, Unlearning Liberty Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate: Those who, like me, would like to see major religions shift from condemning homosexuality to accepting it can argue, advocate, and bear moral witness for this change. But it is not a change we can, or should even wish to, achieve through coercive tactics like banning Christian groups from campus. That is not the way you create cultural transformation in a free society. It is, in fact, almost guaranteed to stiffen resistance to that change. I ask people who support kicking CLS chapters [and other religious groups] off campus to think about the kind of society we would live in if the government could force masses of citizens to the periphery if they refused to abandon their deepest beliefs. I believe that is not a society most Americans would want to live in, even if it produced some temporary “victories” for causes we care about. But even outside the particular issues of gay rights and conservative Christians, the principle should be clear. The freedom of association afforded by the First Amendment does not stop short at the campus gates. The freedom to associate with those with whom we agree implicitly demands the freedom to not associate with those with whom we do not agree, in other words, exclude those who do not share our group’s beliefs. Absent this, the freedom to associate means very little and every group’s integrity is impoverished. Furthermore, if we want diversity among groups on campus we cannot artificially decide that there must be diversity of opinion within groups on campus. The “all comers” path will actually lead to the watering down of student groups beliefs and the marginalizing of minority viewpoints. Jewish groups should stand with Christian groups and other belief-based or religious groups in opposing a requirement that they must be open to members that oppose everything the group believes. The First Amendment and freedom of association traditionally has required this, but common sense and a belief in a genuinely pluralistic society demand it as well.