Circumlocutions

Reli­gious insti­tu­tions hold a par­tic­u­lar niche in our soci­ety. After all, Amer­ica was founded on reli­gious free­dom (and turkey din­ners). We have to respect each other’s reli­gious beliefs, and a reli­gious insti­tu­tion — such as a school — has the right to fol­low its tenets even in the face of Con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected rights. The ques­tion I find myself ask­ing is: how steep is that slope?

Sure, a pri­vate, reli­gious school can only accept stu­dents of the same faith; that’s a given. What about if the stu­dents are doing things the reli­gion reviles? Can a Lutheran pri­vate school expel two girls for being sus­pected les­bians?
http://​www​.latimes​.com/​n​e​w​s​/​l​a​-​m​e​-​s​c​h​o​o​l​2​8​-​2​0​0​9​j​a​n​2​8​,​0​,​3​5​0​3​1​1​4​.​s​t​o​r​y​?​t​r​a​c​k​=​rss

The truth is, there are two dif­fer­ent issues at play here. One is the pri­vate own­er­ship of the insti­tu­tions; since the State is not offi­cially involved, there is no Con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion. Now, there are all sorts of argu­ments that any school, pri­vate or oth­er­wise, should con­sti­tute “State actors”, but the cur­rent legal cli­mate is that pri­vate schools are not sub­ject to the State Action Doc­trine.
The other issue is that a reli­gious insti­tu­tion must be allowed to prac­tice and adhere to its faith. To para­phrase Bill Cosby, “I know reli­gion! I prac­tice reli­gion!” Are there aspects of most reli­gions that those not within the faith would take offense at? Yes; hell, I know peo­ple in my reli­gion who have a hard time with some of it.

Nor­mally I would view a case like the one linked to above as cor­rect since the per­son has two outs: she can choose to use a dif­fer­ent school and she can choose not to take part in the offend­ing reli­gious prac­tices (again by leav­ing the school by choice). How­ever, since this is a school sit­u­a­tion, and the stu­dent is notfree to make the choices I just men­tioned, this deci­sion does not sit soundly with me — but what are the alternatives?