This time it’s Gene Nichol, UNC Law School dean, trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes:

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The University of North Carolina — like many public institutions — applies a nondiscrimination policy to campus-endorsed student organizations. The Black Student Movement must be open to white students. Women’s advocacy groups must accept men. Jewish clubs, if officially recognized and publicly supported, are required to open their doors to Arabs and Christians.

And not only does UNC-Chapel Hill have such a policy, it has moved to enforce it.

Last year, Alpha Iota Omega, a three-man Christian fraternity, was denied university status for refusing to sign a nondiscrimination statement. …

If the First Amendment requires university recognition of a private group that excludes non-Christians, other moves to fence out homosexuals or Arabs or Jews or blacks — again based on religious or associational compulsion — won’t be far behind. It seems more sensible, and perhaps more conservative, to conclude that when a group shifts from the private to the public realm, obligations of equality attach.
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Note to Dean Nichol: It does. If your university has a program that recognizes a wide spectrum of students groups, then the “obligations of equality” are attached to the program itself, not to each and every single group receiving favor. I refer to Rosenberger v. Rector (1995), in which the Supreme Court ruled that “[i]t does not violate the Establishment Clause [psst ? that’s in the First Amendment] for a public university to grant access to its facilities on a religion-neutral basis to a wide spectrum of student groups, including groups which use meeting rooms for sectarian activities, accompanied by some devotional exercises.”

Speaking of “moves to fence out homosexuals” ? go see Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). There the Court ruled that “implicit in the right to engage in activities protected by the First Amendment is a corresponding right to associate with others in pursuit of a wide variety of political, social, economic, educational, religious, and cultural ends” (emphasis added) and that “forced inclusion of an unwanted person infringes upon the group’s freedom of expressive association if the presence of that person affects in a significant way the group’s ability to advocate public or private viewpoints.”

And I’m going to be nice and not quote from Hurley v. Irish-American Gay Group of Boston (1995) at this point, but I reserve the chance to do so later. Suffice it to say that the Court describes an idea like Nichol’s as being the most certain antithesis to the Speech Clause in … the First Amendment.