A private Christian college lost its attempt on Tuesday to revive a lawsuit challenging federal guidance on housing accommodations.
The Supreme Court, in an unsigned order, declined to take up the College of the Ozarks’ appeal of a lower ruling, which said the school could not move forward with a challenge before a case exists.
College of the Ozarks wants to assign dormitory housing based on students’ biological sex, it has told lower courts.
The college challenged an executive order from President Joe Biden that requires federal agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), “to protect sexual orientation and gender identity” under various discrimination laws.
“Because the college’s faith teaches that sex is based on male-female biology, not gender identity, the college assigns its dorms, roommates, and intimate spaces by sex and communicates that policy to students,” the college’s attorneys told the Supreme Court in its appeal.
“That result has mammoth implications,” the school’s attorneys wrote in court filings. “If HUD gets away with rewriting the FHA via the Directive, it has no incentive to ever go through the rule-making process. That eliminates judicial review until after an enforcement proceeding is complete and the regulated entity has already been harmed.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom represented the Point Lookout, Missouri, school. It has been successful recently in fighting LGBTQ policies and the abortion pill mifepristone.
Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote a brief, supporting College of the Ozarks at the Supreme Court, in March. He said the Biden directive lacks balance in regard to religious institutions.
“As Attorney General, I will always enforce the laws as written, which includes ensuring that the federal government can’t push whatever rule it wants and run roughshod over religious liberty,” Bailey said in a news release, according to the Springfield, Missouri, News-Leader.
“It is absolutely ridiculous that unelected federal bureaucrats are attempting to subvert the law and force religious universities to house male and female students together. This is just yet another attempt by woke leftists to push their social agenda onto students. My office is not going to stand for it.”
The Biden Administration said the guidance does not require “any housing provider to do or refrain from doing anything.” The college “has not alleged any past, current, or threatened enforcement,” the administration wrote to the court.
