Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia jumped into the gender-neutral housing debate last weekend, criticizing a professor’s efforts to challenge mandatory same-sex dormitories.
GW Law School professor John Banzhaf brought suit against Catholic University of America this summer after the religious institution banned first year co-ed dormitories. Banzhaf said the move qualified as sex discrimination under the D.C. Human Rights Act.
Scalia defended same-sex housing during a speech at Duquesne University Law School, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported.
“I hope this place will not yield — as some Catholic institutions have — to this politically correct insistence upon suppression of moral judgment, to this distorted view of what diversity in America means,” Scalia said, according to the Tribune-Review. “Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent upon diversity in all other aspects of life seems bent on eliminating diversity of moral judgment — particularly moral judgment based on religious views.”
CUA President John Garvey said the institution’s decision to mandate same-sex housing aims to curb “binge drinking and hooking up.”
Scalia – the longest serving justice on the Supreme Court after 25 years – defended his originalist interpretation of the Constitution and religion in the public sphere.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Banzhaf responded with a statement that he was “astonished that a justice of the nation’s highest court would single out and pre-judge a legal proceeding which could set an important precedent, and could one day even come before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“It obviously isn’t frivolous if a Supreme Court justice thinks the legal action might force Catholic U to change its policy,” Banzhaf said in the same statement.
“This takes us back to the 1950s and 1960s when dorms were segregated. But we’ve come a long way now, and we shouldn’t go back,” Banzhaf, 70, told The Hatchet in June. “They’re going back to the ‘good old days’ when boys were in one dorm and girls in the other. That was fine in ‘Leave It To Beaver,’ but it’s not appropriate now.”
