I was born in a Sunni Muslim home in Bangladesh, where I learned the meaning of stern discipline from my father, a major general in the military with responsibilities in the intelligence service. We lived on different army bases in elaborate quarters reserved for officers and their families. Servants catered to our every need. The business and political elite of Bangladesh and Pakistan frequented social events in our home.
I grew up attending an Islamic madrasa (religious school), where we studied the Qur’an and learned classical Arabic from an imam. My father could trace his lineage back to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (the name derives from Hashem, grandson of the prophet Muhammad’s great-grandfather). His heritage qualified me as a direct descendant of Islam’s founder.
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Apr 16th, 2021 4 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Legal Fellow, Meese Center
Sarah Parshall Perry is a legal fellow for the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Cleland’s ruling flipped the script. In fact, it was InterVarsity that had been discriminated against by Wayne State, whose actions were “obviously odious to the Constitution.” SDI Productions / Getty Images
Key Takeaways
Campus groups, students, and professors who aren’t interested in kowtowing to groupthink have had a run of good luck lately in federal courts.
InterVarsity’s constitution allows all students to join the group as members, but leadership positions are limited to those who agree with its statement of faith.
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The fight for campus access for faith-based student groups scored another legal victory this week.
A district court judge ruled on Monday that Wayne State University violated the First Amendment with a 2017 decision that temporarily denied InterVarsity Christian Fellowship its status as a student group over the chapter’s requirement that its leaders be Christian.
Wayne State’s nondiscrimination policy, according the 83-page opinion by Robert Cleland, “violated plaintiffs’ rights to internal management, free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and free exercise as a matter of law.”
The judge ruled that the First Amendment protects religious organizations’ rights to select their own ministers, and that the InterVarsity chapter’s student leaders qualified as ministers. While InterVarsity is open to all students, it asks leaders to sign a statement of faith.