SIVACRACY.NET: What Goes Around Comes Around

Colleges Can Bar Army Recruiters, by Adam Liptak in the NYT:
"Universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal money, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.

The 2-to-1 decision relied in large part on a decision in 2000 by the United States Supreme Court to allow the Boy Scouts to exclude gay scoutmasters. Just as the Scouts have a First Amendment right to bar gays, the appeals court said, law schools may prohibit groups that they consider discriminatory. ...

The appeals court said the law violated First Amendment rights of the schools in two ways. First, Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote, the schools are entitled not to associate with groups whose policies they oppose. "Just as the Boy Scouts believed that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath," Judge Ambro wrote, "the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to fairness and justice." Second, Judge Ambro said, the presence of military recruiters on campus forced universities to convey a message with which they disagreed. That is, he said, a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment." ....

And the homophobia of the Boy Scouts made it all possible. Had the Boy Scouts not convinced the Supreme Court that they were constitutionally permitted to be homophobic and still receive support from the government, the law schools would have had a much harder time convincing the court they had a right to bar military recruiters!