MURRIETA: Judge throws out religious discrimination suit
PDF of the Judge's ruling
Quote: A federal judge in Los Angeles has thrown out the remaining claims of Calvary Chapel Christian School, which sued the University of California alleging university officials rejected some courses for credit because of their Christian viewpoint.
U.S. District Judge James Otero said in a summary judgment ruling released Friday that the school had failed to show evidence that UC officials had violated the First Amendment rights of the five Calvary students who sued along with the school and the Association of Christian Schools International.
Robert Tyler, an attorney who represented Calvary, said Friday night that the decision will be appealed.
"We always believed we were going to have to get up in the higher courts before we would get a ruling that would be favorable to us," said Tyler, general counsel for Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a religious liberty law firm in Murrieta.
In March, Otero threw out the Christian school's broader claims that UC policies were unconstitutional on their face. Friday's ruling concerned Calvary's claims that the policies were also unconstitutional as they were applied in the review of several classes.
Otero wrote that Calvary "provided no evidence of animus" on the part of university officials, whom he said had a "rational basis" for determining that the proposed Calvary courses would not meet the UC college preparatory requirements.
Behe was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in this case, and got smacked down in the judge's ruling.
Quote: Both professors concluded that neither the A Beka nor the BJU Biology texts are appropriate for use as the principal text in a college preparatory biology course. (Ayala Decl. Ex. A, at 28; Kennedy Decl. Ex. A, at 20.) In making this finding, Professor Kennedy reiterated Professor Sawrey's initial conclusion that "the problem is not . . . that the creationist view is taught as an alternative to scientific explanations, but that the nature of science, the theory of evolution, and critical thinking are not taught adequately." (Kennedy Decl. Ex. A, at 7.)
Plaintiffs offer little admissible evidence to the contrary. Plaintiffs' Biology expert, Dr. Michael Behe, submitted a declaration concluding that the BJU text mentions standard scientific content. (Watters Decl. Ex. U.) However, Professor Behe "did not consider how much detail or depth" the texts gave to this standard content. (Watters Decl. Ex. U ¶ 4.) Therefore, Professor Behe fails to refute one of Professor Kennedy's primary concerns that the nature of science, the theory of evolution, and critical thinking are not taught adequately.