In April, the Christian Legal Society (CLS) of the University of Idaho College of Law asked the Student Bar Association Council (SBA) for $50 for the 2001-02 school year. The CLS is a Christian law fellowship that holds prayer and Bible study meetings while "proclaiming the gospel in word and in deed."

Since the SBA is funded through mandatory student activity fees paid by all the legal students — and since the CLS had gotten money from them in the past — there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t get the $50.

They were wrong.

Though CLS meetings are open to any student at the law school, the club requires its officers and voting members to sign a statement of faith.

And this year, the SBA decided that the act of signing the statement amounted to a "discriminatory practice" — one that keeps students who don’t agree with the CLS belief system strongly enough to sign the statement from running or even voting in officer elections.

So — being a group of future lawyers — the CLS appealed the decision to the SBA Judiciary.

Students arguing on behalf of the SBA referred the Judiciary Committee to their constitution, which says: "Any organization that discriminates according to race, religion, sex, color, disability, sexual orientation or national or ethnic origin shall not be recognized as an entity worthy of funds, endorsement or participation through the SBA."

The SBA also referred the committee to a 1974 federal court case in which the judges said, " ‘Discrimination’ is a term well understood in the law. It is in general a failure to treat all persons equally where no reasonable distinction can be found between those favored and those not favored."

But on May 23, the Judiciary decided the case in favor of the CLS, saying that a person’s religious faith — or lack of it — is a "reasonable distinction" to deny them the right to vote or run for office in a Christian organization.

"What does discrimination mean?" the judiciary committee wrote in their finding. "Certainly one could argue, as has CLS, that a person who does not have the same core religious beliefs as their religious organization, or who will not sign a statement adopting those core beliefs, likely is not the best qualified person to lead CLS in the accomplishment of its purposes. Arguably, under this definition, CLS does not discriminate.

"A person who will not adhere to or sign the CLS’s statement of faith may not be the most effective person to advance the group’s mission and purposes. If they had such beliefs or agreed fully with the purposes and beliefs of the CLS, why would they not sign? The statement of faith requirement is one way the CLS can attempt to maintain its identity and defining features; giving the leadership of the group to someone who is unwilling to sign or adopt the statement creates the possibility that the group will cease to be what it was created to be."

"It was actually a really strong opinion," outgoing CLS chapter president Jim Craig noted with some surprise. "There’s a difference in what we do by limiting our officers to (those signing) a statement of faith and discriminating on the basis of race. So it’s not discrimination to make them sign a statement of faith.

"It was a surprise. I wasn’t expecting them to rule on that issue — we figured they’d probably get into the constitutional issues and turn it down from there or rule that they don’t have to decide."

So when the next academic year begins, the members of the University of Idaho College of Law’s Christian Legal Society will be more than $50 richer — they’ll have a legal precedent they can call their own.