U. Iowa Reportedly Exempts Race-Based Clubs from Discrimination Rules to Provide Safe Space

U. Iowa Reportedly Exempts Race-Based Clubs from Discrimination Rules to Provide Safe Space

A Christian group on campus claims they are held to a very different standard.

The College Fix reports:

Public university admits it exempts race-based clubs from discrimination rules to give them a ‘safe space’

The University of Iowa offers safe spaces for racial minorities. It bans them for religious groups.

The public university’s disparate treatment of certain student groups, based on their composition and viewpoint, must be ruled unconstitutional, according to a Christian student organization in a legal filing Thursday.

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship asked a federal court to issue summary judgment against the university after it admitted in a different lawsuit that it creates numerous exceptions to its antidiscrimination policy, including to provide “safe spaces for minorities which have historically been the victims of discrimination.”

This “gerrymandered position … retains accommodations for virtually everyone but disfavored religious groups,” the Christian group argued.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose rulings are binding on the university, imposed an expensive lesson on its neighbor Iowa State University for its viewpoint-based discrimination of marijuana-reform activists, said the filing.

The Becket law firm, which is representing InterVarsity, said there was nothing left to argue in court because the university “admit religious discrimination” in its Nov. 5 filing opposing summary judgment.

Though the administration “temporarily reinstated” religious groups representing Sikhs, Muslims, Latter-Day Saints and Chinese Christians after InterVarsity filed suit, it “continues to resist a permanent fix and insist that it can treat religious groups different from other groups,” Becket wrote.

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