Conservative Christian schools with anti-gay rules might lose tax-exempt status

If the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming days rules that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, the next domino to fall in the push for gay rights may be a move by the federal government to eliminate tax-exempt status for private schools – mostly conservative Christian colleges – that forbid LGBT relationships.  
The Religious Right is already gearing up to fight this next battle, knowing that religious schools across the country forbid all types of same-sex interaction, from dating to couples’ living in married-student housing.

According to the New York Times, religious groups worry that federal actions would be based on a 1983 Supreme Court decision that allowed the agency to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that banned interracial relationships.

Adding to the potential fury, Vox reports that the dreaded IRS would be the enforcer, declaring that schools which ban same-sex relationships violate “fundamental national public policy” and no longer qualify for tax-exempt status.
Vision America, a Texas-based conservative Christian organization, led the effort to get 50,000 pastors and church members to sign a petition to the Supreme Court justices warning that they would consider any law recognizing same-sex marriage an “unjust law.”

A so-called unjust law that leads to a significant financial setback for these “traditional values” schools could open up a second front in the cultural war against gay rights. Rick Scarborough, president and founder of Vision America, told the Times that he sees a correlation with the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that essentially upheld the view that slaves were property, not citizens.

“If they change the playing field and make what we do out of bounds, we will disobey; we will disrespect this decision,” Scarborough said. “We’ll treat it like Dred Scott and other decisions courts have handed down over the years that counter natural law. God made a male and a female, and no amount of surgery is going to change that.”

The 1983 Supreme Court decision that established precedent concerned rules at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., that required expulsion of “partners in an interracial marriage,” “students who date outside their race” and members of any group that “advocates interracial marriage.”

In comparison, in Utah the current Brigham Young University honor code bans “homosexual behavior,” including “not only sexual relations between members of the same sex, but all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings.”

The Times reported that legal scholars said the scenario of schools’ losing their tax-exempt status over their policies on these issues was unlikely -- especially in the short term. But they did not rule it out, based on previous civil rights cases.