These schools had based their ban on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military initiated by the Clinton administration, which requires homosexual soldiers to hide their sexual orientation or else be discharged.
The 36 law schools and faculties that make up FAIR had challenged the constitutionality of a series of government measures known as the Solomon Amendment. An appeals court ruled that this addendum to the 1995 National Defense Authorization Act violated the universities’ First Amendment rights by compelling them to subsidize the government’s views “by putting demands on the law schools’ employees and resources.”
The Solomon Amendment denies certain funding to any university that does not provide military recruiters the same access to its campus and students that it extends to nonmilitary recruiters. This applies to funding from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, the CIA, and the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy.
Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and other military recruiters were expelled from many campuses at the height of the movement in the United States against Washington’s war on Vietnam. Columbia University, for example, dissolved its ROTC program in 1969 and last year the university senate voted 51-11 to not allow the program to return.
As Washington seeks to prepare its armed forces for imperialist interventions around the globe, it is seeking to reverse gains such as these working people made during previous struggles. Toward that end, in Rumsfeld v. FAIR the Supreme Court argued as precedent an earlier case in which the judges found that “‘judicial deference…is at its apogee’ when Congress legislates under its authority to raise and support armies.”
The court unanimously stated that—funding or no funding, discrimination or no discrimination—Congress has “the authority to require campus access to military recruiters.”
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