Legal News

Calif. Court Holds That Suspected Lesbians Can Be Legally Expelled

By Nathan Koppel

It’s school-law week at Law Blog central. Yesterday, we noted how some Florida students will have a tough time dodging the pledge of allegiance.

Traveling westward, we note a California state-court ruling this week that a private school can expel lesbian students. Here’s an LA Times piece on the ruling.

The California Lutheran High School expelled two 16-year-old girls for having a “bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship.”

The dispute started in 2005 when a student advised a teacher at the school to look at the girls’ My Space pages. One of the girls was identified as bisexual and the other said she was “not sure” of her sexual orientation. The Web site, according to the school’s attorney, had a photograph of the two girls hugging. The school’s principal also claimed that the girls had been kissing each other.

The girls sued, claiming the school had violated the state’s anti-discrimination law by expelling them. In ruling for the school, a state court cited a 1998 decision by the California Supreme Court, holding that that the Boy Scouts, which had been sued for sexual-orientation discrimination, did not have to comply with state civil rights law.

“The whole purpose of sending one’s child to a religious school is to ensure that he or she learns even secular subjects within a religious context,” wrote judge Betty Richli for the 4th District Court of Appeals. The school is affiliated with synods that believe homosexuality is a sin, the court said. Also, the court concluded, the school did not break the law when it disclosed the girl’s supposed sexual orientation to their parents.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 28, 2009 (boomark / email).