What the Hastings students should and should not do

At the end of the article, Viewpoint Discrimination, in the July 17 issue of World, the question was raised whether this case will be reopened in the lower courts. The basis for reconsideration would be twofold: (1) Hastings may not have enforced the all-comers policy consistently across the board; (2) Hastings apparently did not establish the policy until after the Christian Legal Society had requested official status and been denied.

Regardless of the outcome of this second chance, I want to suggest some things that should and should not happen. First, for the responses I hope will not happen.

I hope this will Supreme Court decisions not be trivialized by inaccurate e mail forwards that end up on Snopes or TruthorFiction.com. I hope that this will not be reduced to a purely partisan issue in the upcoming election rhetoric (after all, there were justices appointed during Republican administrations who voted against the CLS, too). I hope there will not be a petition campaign (they accomplish nothing), or a protest assembly at UC Berkeley, or shrill interviews in the media. I hope there will not be badly written “letters to the editor” in major news outlets.

Here’s what I do hope. I hope that current students in the Hastings College of Law who are Christians will purpose more firmly than ever to assemble in every possible legal venue: the school café, common room, lobby, terrace, or wherever. I hope that they will practice free speech while assembled and, yes, even pray – openly, visibly, unashamedly. I hope they will invite unbelievers to participate in their coffee klatches, study groups, and lunch discussions. I hope they will discuss current events and legal issues with respect to God’s eternal revelation, and not as though human political maneuvering will be man’s salvation.

If they are further marked for discrimination or persecution, I hope they will make careful appeals. I hope that college officials will have a difficult time denying their appeals because of the wise and winsome way in which they are presented. I hope that they will have achieved respect for their intelligence and work ethic before such appeals are made, so that it will be even harder to discriminate against them in good conscience.

I hope that in completing assignments, they will give serious consideration to the Biblical principles and commands which are implicated in each lecture and project. I hope that, where appropriate, they will unashamedly quote God’s word in their assignments. And where they feel it would mean punishment or disqualification to do so, I hope that they will speak the counsels of God in their own paraphrases. I hope that they will represent and defend their cases so reasonably, that the only basis on which to censure them will be that of their faith, and not because of their poor character or scholarship.

And should any of the above activities be forbidden by the college, I hope that these Christians will unambiguously explain why this is unconstitutional and discriminatory on the part of the college. And should it still go badly for them then, I hope that they will take personally negative consequences rather than compromise or deny the reality and relevance of their faith.