Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sent a letter on Friday to the U.S. Department of Education urging the department to maintain a regulation that mandates public universities to uphold the First Amendment or risk losing grant funding.
In accordance with the current rule, which was put in place in 2020 to carry out Supreme Court precedent, public universities are not allowed to deny religious student organizations “any right, benefit or privilege that is otherwise afforded to other student organizations at the public institution” because of the group’s “beliefs, practices, policies, speech, membership standards or leadership standards, which are informed by sincerely held religious beliefs.”
Last month, the Biden Administration’s Education Department threatened to revoke this protection.
“The Department proposes to rescind the regulations because they are not necessary to protect the First Amendment right to free speech and free exercise of religion; have created confusion among institutions; and prescribe an unduly burdensome role for the Department to investigate allegations regarding IHE’s (institutions of higher education) treatment of religious student organizations,” The Education Department said in an announcement last month.
According to Yost, “religious freedom is neither confusing nor burdensome.”
“Day after day, we see school administrators across the country targeting student religious groups as unworthy of existence. Our county was founded on an entirely different principle – that Americans can practice their religion without fear of government reprisal,” Yost said.
The letter, co-signed by 21 other state attorney generals, says that attacks on specific student religious organizations highlight the necessity for the safety offered by the current rule.
“The religious practice of student groups and individuals is under immense fire at universities. Religious students have greatly enriched campus communities, through charity, service, temperance, and commitment to learning. They are owed the right to freely exercise their religion, however out of fashion with an increasingly anti-religious bureaucratic regime that might be,” the letter says.
The letter goes on to say that repealing the regulation would go against Supreme Court decisions prohibiting the use of government power against religion.
“The department is blessing the targeting of religious groups. That is wrong,” the letter says.
The letter further claims that the rule modification would cause “irreparable harm to students for no federal benefit.”
The co-signers on the letter sent Friday were the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia.
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Hannah Poling is a lead reporter at The Ohio Star and The Star News Network. Follow Hannah on Twitter @HannahPoling1. Email tips to [email protected]
Photo “Dave Yost” by Dave Yost Attorney General. Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House. Background Photo “Religious Group” by erge.
