Most state universities benignly require student fees then distribute them without your approval. At Florida State University, for example, mandatory student fees helped the Women’s Center bring in Mary Daly, a Boston College professor of theology. She was the Center’s keynote for the 1997 “Stop Rape Week.” Despite it’s noble-sounding name, the week served as cover for Daly’s diatribe. Among other things, she attacked Christianity as an “infrastructure of the patriarchy,” used an excretory expletive to describe the Apostle’s Creed and claimed the Bible promotes rape.

Then there’s the Center for Participatory Education, which serves as a clearinghouse for a host of liberal causes and groups. Some recent offerings include the Wiccan (Witchcraft) Discussion Group, the Just Coming Out Group and the “Full Moon Skinny-Dip” (sponsored by the Tallahassee Bare Devils).

Scott Southworth, a law student at the University of Wisconsin, didn’t think he should have to pay fees to groups he disagreed with on his campus. So he filed a lawsuit.

Paying Their Way
During his last year of college (1994), Scott was just one of several students, both liberal and conservative, working to eliminate the student government because of its corrupt methods of doling out student fees. Scott says the Wisconsin Student Association (WSA) was stacked with liberals who basically funneled student fees to the International Socialist Organization; the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center and the Campus Women’s Center, to name a few.

Scott, a Christian, didn’t like the fact that his money was helping foot the bill for “Coming Out Day,” pro-abortion lobbying at the state Capitol and a gay and lesbian film festival.

Scott’s efforts to end the practice flopped. That’s when a friend told him about a religious-liberty group called the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based group provides financial aid to pro-life and religious-liberties causes. Their newsletter’s description of lawsuits-in-progress started Scott thinking about the possibility of going legal.

Perfect Timing
ADF was primed for Scott Southworth. Shortly before his call, the organization had pinpointed mandatory-fee systems as a prime target.

In 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia that students may have a constitutional right to opt out of funding ideological advocacy groups they don’t agree with. It was an invitation. All ADF needed was a college student fed up with his school’s fee system.

Enter Scott. When he called ADF, they referred him to Jordan Lorence, a constitutional attorney who had successfully argued cases for them. “The hand of God is raising this guy up,” Jordan remembers thinking the first time he heard Scott’s message on his answering machine. “This is exactly what the Supreme Court justices were talking about.” ADF agreed to fund the case.

Scott and Jordan started boning up on the intricacies of the fee system at Wisconsin. Then they spent a day on campus stuffing bags full of pamphlets, flyers and other promotional materials from groups they thought might be objectionable. “By the end of that day I was convinced that we had a very significant lawsuit,” Jordan says. “Some of the material was just disgusting — immoral stuff that I don’t want to defile people by describing.” They also found blatantly political material that would bolster their case.

Jordan planned to go straight to federal district court and challenge the fee system on first amendment grounds. He would argue two things: that the University of Wisconsin couldn’t compel an individual to fund a private group — liberal or conservative — that engages in political or ideological advocacy, and that simply allowing students to opt out of paying for certain groups they didn’t agree with wasn’t good enough. Students should have to proactively choose to fund these groups.

Good luck.

It Worked for David
Nobody really took the lawsuit seriously, Jordan says. Which makes sense, when you consider what they were up against. Most campus groups survive exclusively on student fees; they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. To top it off, state universities across the country have the same fee system and wouldn’t take kindly to somebody messing with it.

“We were kind of laughed off at first,” Jordan says. Sound familiar? Behemoth bad guy in armor mocks puny shepherd and his slingshot, and takes a fall.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline said it all: “UW students win campus fees case.” Bull’s-eye! Suddenly the universities and liberals weren’t snickering anymore. “That was the big wake-up call, when we won at the district court,” Jordan recalls. “We’re not just a bunch of right-wing kooks that don’t know what we’re doing.”

The fight continued. The university appealed the decision to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, hoping it would reverse the lower court’s decision. To the university’s dismay, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court ruled unanimously to uphold the lower court’s decision.

The UW Board of Regents is currently trying to get the full 7th Circuit to overturn the three-judge panel’s decision. Assuming that doesn’t happen, UW’s next stop is the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bring it on, say Jordan and Scott. The Supreme Court has already signaled its distaste for mandatory fees. Plus, a favorable ruling from the nation’s highest court would mean death for every mandatory-fee system in the country — the ultimate victory. If the high court takes the case, a ruling probably won’t come until 1999.

Jordan is encouraged by the progress they’ve made. But he isn’t surprised. “The reason we’ve been successful is we did our homework and we understood where the Supreme Court was going with this,” he says.

The Ripple Effect
Scott’s courage is inspiring. At the University of Minnesota, Grant Buse (pronounced BEUW-see) discovered the same liberal funding machine. “The mandatory-fee system is oppressive to all students, not just students that might hold Christian or conservative views,” said Grant, who is heavily involved in three Christian groups on campus.

As soon as the district court decision was handed down, Grant and several of his buddies teamed up with Jordan to launch another challenge. ADF agreed to fund that case, too. They’re still collecting evidence and hearings are pending.

I Hate to Say This
Things are looking up for Scott, Grant and Lisa, a senior fighting similar battles at Florida State University. Their fight against campus liberalism, however, is not without bruises.

Grant says he and his fellow plaintiffs at Minnesota became popular targets in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Minnesota Daily, the campus newspaper. “They’d say we’re just homophobic and we have some fascist Nazi-type motives and we just want to censor everything that everybody’s doing,” he says.

All three say they’ve been called bigots, skinheads and worse. Scott recalls an encounter he had with an opponent: “He came up to me and said I was a racist and I couldn’t get past my blue eyes and white skin.” On another occasion, he watched a gay student scream in frustration at a female fellow-plaintiff while she was standing in a crowded line. “There is no question that these people don’t just dislike our viewpoints,” Scott says. “They hate us.”

He spent a while looking over his shoulder after his dean warned him about the possibility of physical attacks. Thankfully, however, he and his friends endured nothing more than verbal assaults. Still, words cut deep.

“There were times that I was in tears,” Scott recalls. “Getting called names maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you get called a skinhead it’s very personal.”

How do they cope?

“We pray first,” Scott says. “You have to do that all of the time. You stand for righteousness in the public forum and there’s going to be people who yell and scream. ... [But] we’ve got nothing against these guys. We want to see them come to the knowledge of the Truth like anybody else.” In Lisa’s words, “You have just got to show the love of God in the midst of standing up for His principles.”

But they realize affliction is light compared to other Christians around the world. “We are not martyrs by any means,” Scott says. “There are a lot of other people around the world who are giving up their lives. If all I have to do is get called a bigot on campus, I can pretty much handle that.”

18 Hours, a Job and a Court Date
Martyrs or not, what Scott, Grant and Lisa are doing isn’t typical college activity. Between classes, studying, tests, sports and all the other campus goings on, how does a student have time to file a lawsuit?

“There isn’t much time involved,” Scott says. He mainly researched groups on campus and gave a few speeches. Jordan handled most of the legal stuff. “We don’t have time not to do this,” he concludes. “If we are unwilling to stand up on our college campuses, then when do we think we are going to stand up?”

And the experience is not without its benefits. “Studies will always be there,” Lisa says. “You can always go to class and argue political science issues, but when you are in there doing it, that is when you learn the most.”

The best benefit, however, is spiritual. “I recognized how powerful God is, how in control He is,” Scott says. “You may not always know what the end result is going to be, but as a minister told me, ‘God calls us to be faithful, not successful.’”