Washington – The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up the Pentagon’s claim that it has an equal right to recruit new employees on the nation’s college campuses, despite its policy of discriminating against gays and lesbians.
Last year, a coalition of law schools won a ruling saying they had a right to refuse to make their facilities available to military recruiters. If that ruling were to stand, it would affect the rights of colleges and universities nationwide.
The justices said they would hear the Bush administration’s appeal in a case that poses a clash between government money and free speech.
The Pentagon says that because colleges and universities take federal funds, they have an obligation to give the military the same right to recruit on campus as other employers.
“Effective recruitment is essential to an all-volunteer military, particularly in a time of war,” the government’s lawyers said.
Congress adopted the Pentagon’s view in a spending provision known as the “Solomon Amendment” in 1996. It threatens to cut off federal money to colleges and universities that bar reserve officer training programs from campus or that deny military recruiters “equal access” to students on the same basis as other employers.
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., a co-sponsor of the amendment, said lawmakers wanted to “send a message over the wall of the ivory tower of higher education” that their “starry- eyed idealism comes with a price. If they are too good – or too righteous – to treat our nation’s military with the respect it deserves, then they may also be too good to receive the generous level of taxpayer dollars presently enjoyed by many institutions of higher education.”
Two years ago, a coalition of several dozen law schools and some professors challenged the law as unconstitutional. They noted that since 1990, most of the nation’s law schools have adopted a strict policy of nondiscrimination. The policies say, among other things, that on-campus facilities will not be available to employers who “discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, handicap or disability, age or sexual orientation.”
They said the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy discriminates against gays and lesbians. They also said they should not be forced to encourage students to meet with military recruiters.
The Defense Department wants to recruit law school graduates to serve as lawyers or judges in the military.
