Texas Supreme Court Puts Religion Over Common Sense

Last week, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that state restrictions on what unaccredited religious institutions can call themselves and their curriculum violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

To fully illustrate just how asinine this is, all you have to do is read the first paragraph of the Court’s opinion, drafted by none other than Justice Nathan Hecht:

The State of Texas requires a private post-secondary school to meet prescribed standards before it may call itself a “seminary” or use words like “degree”, “associate”, “bachelor”, “master”, and “doctor” — or their equivalents — to recognize attainment in religious education and training. We must decide whether this requirement impermissibly intrudes upon religious freedom protected by the United States and Texas Constitutions. We hold it does and therefore reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and remand the case to the trial court for further proceedings.

Essentially, unaccredited religious institutions can now call themselves whatever they want and offer whatever kind of degrees they can invent. Does anyone else see the potential for fraud and misrepresentation this will cause?

Here’s a little background:

The court said banning an institution like the Tyndale Theological Seminary in Fort Worth from using the term “seminary” in its name violates the Constitution.

Three religious organizations waged the legal fight. Tyndale, one of the schools, was cited in 1998 for violating a law that requires seminaries to be accredited and prevents unaccredited institutions from awarding degrees. It was fined $173,000 by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Plano-based Liberty Legal Institute represented the schools and argued before the court in 2005 that the state has no business regulating how pastors are trained.

State law requires institutions to meet certain standards if they call themselves a college, university or seminary. The court ruled that the law as it pertains to seminaries intrudes upon religious freedom.

“This decision is a huge victory for all seminaries not only in Texas but nationwide,” said Kelly Shackelford, the institute chief counsel. “Seminaries are going to now be free to be seminaries … The shackles are off.”

The case is not about secular teaching and degrees, but about purely theological education, he said. Shackelford said the ruling means the plaintiffs can try to recover attorneys’ fees incurred in the case.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office represented the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and told the court that the state law aims not to regulate religion but only the quality of post-secondary education in Texas.

That’s true; it’s [Chapter 61 of the Education Code] kind of like the Deceptive Trade Practices Act for private education. For one thing, it has helped prevent “diploma mills” from operating. And, though the Court acknowledged this in their opinion, they still came to the same conclusion:

Accordingly, we conclude that section 61.304’s restriction on the words that a religious institution may use to refer to completion of religious programs of study is so broad that it violates the Free Exercise guarantees of the First Amendment and the Texas Constitution. The State may not deny a religious program of study clearly denominated as such the use of all words capable of describing educational achievement.

You can bet that if a Wicca school was converging degree titles of “High Priestess” upon people, the Court would have ruled differently.

This is yet another example of why we need change on the Texas Supreme Court.

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