While the U.S. Education Dept. said this week that federal law would protect transgender students from discrimination in education, a recent Department of Justice statement could mean these protections will remain nullified for students at religious schools.
A religious exemption included in Title IX – the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education – exempts religious institutions from parts of the law if they conflict with “religious tenets of the organization,” according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
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Earlier this month, the Department of Justice said in a court filing that it would be able to defend the exemption. This filing was in response to Hunter vs. the U.S. Dept. of Education, a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Oregon by 33 LGBTQ students of conservative Christian colleges against the department, which provides funding to the institutions per federal law.
The suit “asserts the constitutional and basic human rights of LGBTQ+ students, seeking to end the sexual, physical and psychological abuses perpetrated under the religious exemption to Title IX at thousands of federally-funded schools, colleges and universities across America,” according to the Religious Exemption Accountability Project.
Joanna Maxon, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, said in a recent Facebook video that she was just five classes short of earning her degree from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA, when the school expelled her for being in a same-sex marriage.
“Almost three years later, I’m still working through the damage of my expulsion,” Maxon said. “I don’t have a degree, but I do have a large amount of student loan debt.”
Fuller Theological Seminary notes on its website that it expects students to view marriage as a contract between a man and a woman.
Maxon said her experience at the Christian school prior to expulsion indicated it accepted people from denominations that condoned LGBTQ relationships.
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To claim exemption from Title IX, the highest ranking official from a given institution can submit written statements to the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights explaining what portions of the law conflict with their religious tenets, according to the Department of Education. Last year, a U.S.
District Court Judge for the Central District of California ruled that Fuller Theological Seminary was exempt from Title IX because it was protected by the religious exemption in a separate suit filed by Maxon and another former seminary student.