Private religious schools may have won a big victory Wednesday when the California Supreme Court declined to decide whether a so-called “Christian Conduct” rule prohibiting homosexuality violated the state’s premier civil rights law.
The high court’s decision not to review a case out of Riverside County lets stand a lower court’s ruling that the California Lutheran High School is not a business enterprise and, therefore, not subject to the state’s 50-year-old Unruh Civil Rights Act.
In a depublication request filed with the Supreme Court in March, the San Francisco-based American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California called the January ruling by Riverside’s Fourth District Court of Appeal an “ill-considered opinion” — even though the court itself called the ruling “narrow.”
“The opinion could be construed,” ACLU attorneys wrote, “to contain a wholesale exemption for any private school that in its mission statement claims to ‘inculcate [its students] with a specific set of values.'”
