Banning military recruiters

This will be an interesting case.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the nation's colleges and universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without losing federal funding.

The case, to be heard in the fall, poses a clash between government money and free speech.

A coalition of law schools last year won an appellate court ruling that said their right to free speech included the right to refuse to associate with military recruiters. The law schools argued that the Pentagon's policies on gays and lesbians in the military were discriminatory.

They cite an ironic precedent.

In their suit, the law schools argue that under the 1st Amendment's protection for free speech, they have a right not to associate with persons or organizations that espouse discriminatory policies — and they are relying on a recent and controversial Supreme Court precedent for this view.

Five years ago, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that the Boy Scouts had a free-speech right not to associate with homosexuals and thus could exclude from their ranks an openly gay scoutmaster from New Jersey. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the author of the opinion, said the Scouts' free-speech right of "expressive association" trumped a New Jersey law that prohibited discrimination against gays.

The same is true in the military recruiting case, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia said last year.

In other words, the decision allowing the Boy Scouts to discriminate against gays is bolstering the legal case for limiting recruiting by an organization that discriminates against gays.