Virginia Tech faces a religious conundrum
By Christian Trejbal
Virginia Tech recently avoided litigation, but the reprieve could be temporary. Murky precedent leaves the school — indeed every public university — in a tough spot when an aggressive religious group comes to town.
Virginia Tech
Tech, like most universities, collects a mandatory activity fee from students — $437 for the coming year. That money pays for things that foster an engaging campus environment, including funding student organizations’ activities. Two oversight boards last year awarded $885,000 to organizations. Some received tens of dollars; some received tens of thousands.
Legally, those fees are public money because Tech is a state school. The school therefore has spending guidelines. One rule, for example, prohibits funding political campaigns.
Another rule curtailed some religious uses so that no one could accuse the school of violating the First Amendment. It read, “Organizations will not be provided funding to support religious worship or religious proselytizing. Funding requests to host religiously oriented programs, on campus and open to the community, that are educational and balanced in nature will be considered by the board.”
Trejbal is a Roanoke Times editorial writer. He is based in the New River Valley.
August 19, 2012 - 8:02 AM
This is not really a conundrum at all.The age of transparency has finally created an arena where any and all mingling of church and state comes under scrutiny and gets reported to and supported by organizations that investigate constitutional non-compliance. The Giles County public schools 10 commandments argument is a perfect textbook case. These rural, yokel counties think that as long as they can bully citizens into not complaining about an obvious constitutional guarantee that separates church and state – that no one gives a flying whit or will be too scared to make a complaint. Guess what? Nothing escapes scrutiny in this day and age and that’s a good thing. Student fees collected at public schools should not fund any religious organization – period.
A $437 student activity fee is actually an involuntary tax on all students. Students are forced to pay this tax and student “leaders” then distribute it amongst various student groups. Students who don’t participate in the favored groups or attend the concerts, etc. subsidize those who do. Tech, and many other colleges, should abolish these mandatory taxes and permit student groups (religious, political, social) to raise their own funds from participating students.
Maybe if Virginia Tech actually called it a tax, instead of a fee or a penalty, it would pass constitutional muster. Taking a page out of the Obama playbook.
Atheism is not a religion.
In the Giles Case, the anti-Theists BANNED a document from the school. In the VT case, the anti-Theists BANNED VT from giving money to certain groups.
I find it ironic that Brit wants to BAN Muslims and Sikhs from getting student fee support. I’m curious if he wants them banned in other ways as well.
Public institutions are taxpayer-funded and should abide by the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state – period. The “document” removed from Giles County PUBLIC schools was a religious artifact and should never have been allowed to be displayed in the first place. Again, I thank the transparency of the modern-day arena for alerting this constitutional transgression to the law-abiding public. Rural areas can no longer hide from public scrutiny and that’s a good thing. Va Tech needs to eliminate any funding to religious groups and stop trying to interpret whether a group is “teaching, promoting, or sponsoring” religious activity. “A rose is a rose is a rose…Gertrude Stein…”
#4, Henry, get it right, the folks who filed and support the Giles case are not “anti-theists” they are pro-U.S Constitution-ists. Some of us love “god” (or whatever one wants to call a supreme deity) but also feel no government agent or agency has the right to promote one specific version of that deity. And yes, that applies to ALL religions and our government.
#6 Henry generally doesn’t like folks who support the Constitution if it involves a position he doesn’t like.
So Hate against Muslims and Sikhs is now defined as “pro-Constitution”. I suppose Jim Crow laws were pro-Constitution to you folks as well.
#1 Brit, why do you think the folks from Giles are “yokels”?
I believe you probably need a remedial course in the Constitution. There is NO-I repeat-NO separation of church and state anywhere in the document. I challenge anyone to find such a statement! “Congress shall make no law…..” has always meant, and still means, Congress can not legalize a “state religion.”
Most people well know, as does anyone reading the Constitution, that this was always the intent of that article. Who cares if Giles posts them in school? If I want to find the Ten Commandments hanging somewhere, I don’t go to a church, I head straight for a government building. I go to a courthouse or a legislature. I will even go to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC, where there are two separate stone engravings depicting the Ten Commandments. You may ask the question why are they hanging in government buildings and not religious buildings? Because even if you know nothing of history, or you view it from a totally secular point of view, the Ten Commandments have formed the basis for civil law in the western world for thousands of years. All this shows me is the ignorance and “political correct”dumbing down of the whole system. Sad.
Sam, I’m taking a walking tour of the US Supreme Court as we speak and I see no depiction of the 10 commandments. In US District Court – I see no depiction of the 10 commandments. Are you living on a parallel planet or something? “…thousands of years…” My comparative religious studies tell me that christianity is not that old and is definitely not the basis for civil law in the western world. And yes, when yokel community leaders and public school board members request that a teenager’s identity be outed to harass his/her family into withdrawing its constitutional challenge to the display of the 10 commandments in a public school – I identify that area as yokel-ish, bully-ish,and uneducated.