OPEN LETTER SAYS GROUP'S BAN VIOLATES CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES
October 11, 2002
An Open Letter from the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to the Student Bar Association, Washington University School of Law
Dear Members of the Student Bar Association,
We were both surprised and profoundly disappointed to learn of your most recent meeting, at which the Student Bar Association (SBA) left unchanged its decision not to recognize Law Students Pro-Life (LSPL) as a legitimate student group at Washington University School of Law (WUSL). We hoped that, with time and further thought, LSPL's right to exist would become as clear to you as it is to all of the individuals and organizations that have opposed your decision. We will try one last time to persuade you to recognize LSPL and to reaffirm your commitment to tolerance, openness, and pluralism.
The right to private conscience is more than a constitutional right and an internationally recognized human right. It is also a moral principle upon which our entire system of liberty depends. By offering to recognize LSPL only if it modified its beliefs to suit principles that you found more to your liking, you were asking your fellow students to betray their deeply held beliefs as a precondition of enjoying the minimal rights of a recognized organization at WUSL. In short, you made their moral right to associate freely as a student group dependent upon their abandonment of their right to private conscience. No school that believes in freedom and human dignity could ask such a thing of its own students.
SBA has contended that LSPL's mission is "too narrow" to allow for recognition. Although the SBA and WUSL routinely recognize associations organized around group-identity and common interests such as golf, you have ruled that issues relating to reproductive rights are "narrow." In fact, issues related to reproductive rights are some of deepest and most divisive issues in our country, desperately in need of the sort of reasoned advocacy that produces significant debate. It is particularly strange for law students to argue that reproductive rights are a "narrow" issue. For example, you have recognized a student group organized around interests in the criminal law. Far more individuals will face reproductive choices than will face the system of criminal justice, and no one would consider issues of criminal justice "narrow." Anyone familiar with constitutional law knows that the debates and battles surrounding reproductive rights have transformed legal notions concerning control of one's body, privacy, protest, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. There is nothing narrow about LSPL, except your conception of it.
We are pleased that the administration of WUSL at least attempted to convince you that LSPL should be recognized. However, we do not agree that it is appropriate for them to place the autonomy of the SBA over the fundamental rights of LSPL students. Majority votes by agencies of power do not trump constitutional rights (and their moral principles), any more than they undo the moral right to legal equality. Civilized democracy includes rights so essential to liberty, dignity, fairness, and decency that we place them outside the power of elected government to vote them away. Civil liberties reflect, among other things, the moral necessity of restraint upon power.
Simply put, if you do not live up to your obligations to respect the deeply held beliefs and rights of your fellow students, you are acting outside your legitimate powers. The administration of WUSL may not and must not permit such an action to stand.
We hope that you-as law students and as citizens-understand that the ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights are more than just regulations. They codify moral principles and rights that we, as a people, believe are inalienable. We ask you to act in the spirit of these essential moral principles and to recognize the right of your fellow students to organize in accordance with their own beliefs, even if you disagree with those beliefs. We hope that the SBA will finally make the right choice. It is no weakness to change one's mind when it is appropriate.
?Sincerely,
?The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri?The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education