Denver, CO – August 11, 2021 – Mountain States Legal Foundation today weighed in on behalf of a Christian college that finds itself in the crosshairs of Joe Biden’s overzealous “equity” enforcers but can’t get its day in court, to mount a defense of its First Amendment liberties, because a judge wrongly ruled that the school lacks “standing.”
MSLF believes the school has a compelling case to make that its First Amendment freedoms are being trampled by federal housing mandates that dictate how it manages its dormitories. The school wants to have male and female students live separately. The Biden Administration says that violates federal housing rules and it is forcing the school to change its handbook and advertising to conform to the government’s views. The merits of the case can’t be heard, however, unless the school can establish stranding and get its day in court, which is what MSLF is fighting for.
The case, School of the Ozarks v. Biden, arose after the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), under an executive order from President Biden, began forcing housing providers to stop “discriminating” on the basis of “gender identity or sexual orientation.” The College of the Ozarks, a private Christian college in Missouri, is one such housing provider and filed a lawsuit back in April, claiming the policy clashes with its deeply held religious beliefs. The College separates student housing based on biological sex.
Yet now Biden’s HUD is coercing the school into allowing biological males, based on their gender identity, to live in female housing on campus, using their showers, bathrooms, and even dorm rooms. What’s more, the College is being forced to make affirmative statements that residence halls aren’t separated by biological sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
This is a blatant violation of the College’s right to exercise the very religious beliefs upon which it was founded, according to MSLF. The Biden administration is effectively ordering the school to both ignore and denounce its belief in sex as an immutable, God-given characteristic. As such, HUD’s enforcement activity is a clear violation of the First Amendment, intentionally infringing upon the College’s right to freely advocate for sex-separated dorms and its right to freely express its religiously based conception of the human person.
Nonetheless, the District Court for the Western District of Missouri wrongfully threw out the College’s case, claiming that it doesn’t face “harm… that is actual or imminent…” Yet the fight for liberty does not die so easily. The school is appealing the decision in the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, backed by MSLF, fighting for its natural rights to free exercise and free speech.
“This case is about having your day in court when the government regulates speech in a troubling new way,” explained MSLF Senior Attorney Tyler Martinez, “but it’s also about convincing the court that ‘standing’ is warranted because government actions have done the school real harm.”
“Here you have government restricting a private school’s speech, compelling it to abandon deeply held religious beliefs, and requiring it to engage in self-censorship. We tell the Court of Appeals that, under the First Amendment, forcing an entity to engage in self-censorship is a recognized injury. We need to keep the courthouse doors open and keep the College’s case alive.”
Follow this link to read the case page.
Follow this link to read the filing.