Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Friday that Manhattan’s Yeshiva College can ignore a state court ruling ordering it to allow an LGBT student club for now.
The ruling handed down in Manhattan’s state supreme court in June was celebrated by gay students and their supporters, but by the administrators of Yeshiva, America’s most prominent modern Orthodox Jewish institution of higher education. Condemned. They derided it as an attack on religious freedom and vowed to appeal. The university applied for an emergency stay at the end of last month.
On Friday evening, Judge Sotomayor confirmed it. A lower court judge wrote that the state’s decision was “hereby suspended pending further order by the signatories or the court.”
The ruling suggests that the Supreme Court, which has taken an increasingly broad view of religious freedom in recent years, could take up the university’s case. Since Judge Amy Coney Barrett joined her court in 2020, petitioners have almost always won in religious freedom cases.
Yeshiva’s case is the latest skirmish in a decades-long national struggle over religious freedom, in which institutions and even devout individuals cannot provide public accommodations and services to people with differing views. may be forced to
The university’s appeal has also received attention from other religious groups. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the United States Catholic Bishops’ Conference, and the Council of Christian Universities.
The coalition’s attorney, Jonathan Berry, said in court documents that the yeshiva case concerns whether institutions of religious education can “carry out their faith and mission without interference from the state.” I wrote.
Without that protection, he writes:
A lower court in June ruled that because yesivas are incorporated as educational institutions and not as religious groups, they must comply with New York City’s human rights law, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. The university called the decision “clearly wrong” in June, and in an appeal, called the institution, named after a type of traditional Jewish religious school, a secular institution that emphasizes religion in its curriculum. He stated that it is meaningless to assume that
On Friday, its president, Rabbi Ali Bahman, said the school wants students of all sexual orientations and gender identities to feel comfortable on campus, but it has maintained its identity as an educational institution based on modern Orthodox Judaism. He said he also hopes it will be taken seriously.
Many non-Orthodox Jewish congregations support LGBTQ rights, practice same-sex marriages, and openly choose gay and transgender rabbis to care for the spiritual life of their synagogues. Orthodox leaders, however, tend to interpret the Torah as demanding more traditional ideas of gender and sexuality.
In a statement, Rabbi Bahman said he was “satisfied with Judge Sotomayor’s ruling that protects our religious freedom and identity as a major religiously based academic institution.” “But make no mistake, we will continue to strive to create an environment that welcomes all students, including the LGBTQ community.”
YU Pride Alliance attorney Katie Rosenfeld, who has been seeking formal recognition for several years, said the club would wait for a final order from the court.
“We remain committed to creating a safe space for LGBTQ students on our campus to build community and support each other without discrimination,” she said.
Vina Davidson, former president of the Pride Alliance, said in an interview in June that the Yeshiva’s refusal to endorse the club was to blame for funding the speakers and through the email system, including the entire event. All students said they were deprived of important resources, including their ability to advertise their events. She said her efforts to raise awareness for LGBT student clubs began in 2009.
Yeshiva College states that its mission is to enable students to apply Torah values to the modern world. In court documents, the university outlines how Judaism shapes curriculum and student life.
The school encourages students to participate in an intensive religious program in Israel, with 80 percent participating. Also, male students are required to spend one to six hours a day studying the Torah, and campus doors must be adorned with mezuzahs, small religious scrolls.
The university is represented in this case by attorneys from the Beckett Foundation for Religious Freedom, a public interest law and education firm based in Washington, DC.
In their application for emergency stay, they wrote that Yeshiva’s policies and requirements clearly indicated its status as a religious institution.
“Yeshiva should not have been forced to go to the Supreme Court to receive a common sense judgment upholding her First Amendment rights.” Eric Baxter, vice president of the Beckett Foundation and lead attorney in the case.