LU had a team from the ABA show up in September. No report yet but I imagine that things went pretty well; whatever I may think of Pat Robertson's virulent and offensive form of Christianity, the folks at Liberty U are neither inexperienced nor underfunded. They'll meet any reasonable accreditation requirements I'm sure. Interesting...LU Law does not discriminate on the basis of religion in admissions or general hiring but they DO discriminate on the basis of religion in making faculty appointments. They also purport to impose a strict sexual conduct code. What's THAT got to do with studying law, I wonder? I wonder what will happen when some tenured faculty member at the law school decides to convert to, say, Islam or (worse) Lutheranism. The ABA might take a dim view of any sort of sanction...
FYI, Jerry Fallwell is the President of Liberty. Pat Robertson is associated with Regent University. cbryant
Stupid of me! Well, who can tell the Bobbsey Twins apart, anyway? My point was that I think that LU would be a worthwhile choice for an aspiring lawyer who could take the religious emphasis without tearing his hair out!
Regent University has its own law school. Recently elected Virginia Attorney General, Bob McDonnell, earned his JD from Regent. Liberty University wisely sought the advice of another relatively new law school regarding the ABA process. LU School of Law hired Ave Maria School of Law Dean, Bernard Dobranski, as a consultant for their ABA approval process. http://www.degreeinfo.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11919&highlight=Liberty
Again it comes down to worldview. Apparently the Law School Admission Council and the ABA think that forcing the acceptance of certain behaviors is important enough to attempt to discriminate against others like trying to prevent military recruiting on law school campuses. http://www.lsac.org/LSAC.asp?url=lsac/information-gay-lesbian-bisexual-applicants.asp
Sorry, Charles, but I didn't follow that. Are you suggesting that LU should be allowed to discriminate in admissions as well as hiring? Wouldn't that be a problem if LU participates in federal student financial aid programs?
At least we agree on this! Oh, by the way, I ABSOLUTELY AGREE that no school that receives any sort of federal money, either directly or indirectly, should be permitted to exclude military recruiters. But then, I put in my military time so I suppose I'm biased.
The LU School of Law Notice of Nondiscrimination states the following: For faculty and staff: http://www.liberty.edu/academics/law/index.cfm?PID=8533 Do you think Liberty must be forced to accept those who would undermine the Christian identity and faith mission of the University?
I think that Liberty sees all its secular programs as part of a broader religio-political effort. They are all thoroughly embedded in the distinctive worldview that Liberty exists to promote. I'm sure that there are law schools out there that see the law as an agent of social change in behalf of rather different visions. And I expect that there's already quite a bit of political (to say nothing of race and gender) discrimination in faculy hiring going on all the time. Where Liberty seems to be different is that they turn it into an explicitly religious criterion, favoring theologically conservative evangelicals/fundies who are willing to sign the school's doctrinal loyalty oaths. Of course for Liberty, religion and politics are essentially the same thing. They don't recognize the same sacred-secular distinction that most of us do. It will be interesting to see whether the ABA stands firm on their own principles regarding religious discrimination. My guess is that they won't. They will bend with the political winds. Catholics would be the worst. Worshippers of Satan, they are. (Muslims are just simple heathens and if they resist loving evanglization they can easily be handled with a stake and some gasoline.) I don't know. My guess is that the ABA's first instinct would be to waffle. The thing would have to be pumped up in the press and become a noisy controversy that forces their hand, before the ABA would go head-to-head with such combative and politically connected foes.
Bill, Are you suggesting that Jerry Falwell or Liberty University endorses hatred of Catholics? Maybe that's why they seek guidance from Ave Maria University and often have Catholics like Alan Keyes and Sean Hannity address the the university. I also hope you are not trying to suggest that either Jerry Falwell or Liberty University encourages violence toward anyone.
Well, as long as we provide financial assistance to seminaries and pay military chaplains it's pretty hard to see why LU shouldn't be permitted to require conduct by its staff and students that conforms to the traditional strictures of their avowed religion.
No more so than against Lutherans. I was just making a facetious follow-up to Nosborne's remarks. But what do you think would happen if a Liberty faculty member did change his religious beliefs subsequent to hiring? Imagine that it was a dramatic change, becoming atheist or even Muslim perhaps. If Liberty tried to fire the professor, that would be the employment version of burning heretics. There is an analogy. No, I was making the analogy immediately above, half in jest. But not entirely in jest. While I doubt if anyone at Liberty favors killing homosexuals, I expect that many of them do favor sodomy laws that would subject gays to the armed police power of the state and confine them in state prisons. That reminds me of the inquisition handing heretics over to he secular arm. Historically, I see the religious right as attempting to roll back modernity and hoping to revive at least some of the medieval worldview. And sadly the age of faith was also an age in which differences of faith were life and death matters. Basically Charles, the religious right scares me to death. I might be wrong, but I see it as our home grown American version of what's sweeping the Islamic world, of what the Taliban tried to impose on Afghanistan. It's a desire to reform society in accordance with God's revealed will, according to revelations whose truth only the faithful can see and know.
I think that military chaplains are justified by the free-exercise clause of the Constitution. Chaplains just make the practice of religion possible in the extremely unusual conditions of military service. And seminaries exist in order to prepare religious functionaries by training them in the doctrines, precepts and practices of their tradition. Where schools like Liberty push the envelope is in sweeping all of the secular subjects under that umbrella of religious doctrine and practice. At Liberty the practice of law isn't distinct from religious practice. Certainly religious arguments can be and are made for the expansion of religion's scope to all of life. Maybe they are even right. (Certainly they are most often politically 'right'.) But it does illustrate the resacralizing of broader society and the elimination of secularity that I identify with neo-medievalism.
Technically, Reform Judaism is ALSO devoted to returning religion to society but I take your point. I have OFTEN wondered, even aloud on this very forum, what, exactly, a "Christian" legal education might look like. They can't really say that the constitution and laws of the United States are subject to any sort of Biblical law; the constitution itself says that IT is the supreme law of the land. I have actually seen lawyers and even one state Supreme Court Justice try to make Biblical arguments; the fact is, such arguments are frivolous. Arguing the law is a highly structured and technical process. There is a "right" way and a "wrong" way. I don't really see how a "Christian" lawyer's approach would differ in any significant way from a "Jewish" or "Muslim" or "Atheist" lawyer's approach, barring so total an upheaval in the common law as to represent a second American revolution. A J.D. degree wouldn't be of much use to anyone under THOSE circumstances. Well, maybe not, though. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they established a legal system which subsequently spread throughout the soviet world. Its public law differed markedly from anything that went before but it ended up looking a lot like ordinary Civil Law in its private law...maybe more of our system would survive than I think.
No, it would not be the equivalent of burning heretics. Liberty’s mission statement is: What do you think should happen to the employee of any enterprise who suddenly decided to openly reject its stated mission? I am no longer surprised by your bitter expressions of hostility toward Christianity. You continually try to make the allusion that certain Christians are an American Taliban. This comparison has no merit. How did you come to the conclusion that those associated with Liberty University advocate the incarceration of homosexuals?
