President Joe Biden’s Department of Education wants to eliminate protections for religious student organizations, but Republicans in both the Senate and the House are introducing a bill that, if passed, would punish higher education institutions for discriminating against on-campus faith-based groups.
The Equal Campus Access Act of 2023 from Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan would ensure that any universities or colleges that discriminate against student organizations because of those groups’ “religious beliefs, practices, speech, leadership standards, or standards of conduct” will be barred from receiving taxpayer dollars.
Lankford and Scott along with 15 other GOP senators also penned a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on Monday demanding he withdraw a proposed rule repeal and preserve the protections the Trump administration solidified for religious groups to ensure they are not “subjected to unconstitutional discrimination.”
“First Amendment rights apply to all individuals and organizations on a public college campus regardless of whether their beliefs are favored by the government,” the Republicans wrote.
The legislation and letter are designed to combat Biden’s DOE, which announced in February that it plans to repeal a Trump-era rule that protected faith-based student organizations from discrimination by universities.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding restrictions on the flow of taxpayer dollars to colleges and universities that fail “to promote free and open debate on college and university campuses.” Shortly after that in 2020, Trump’s DOE
