News

YPSILANTI, MI, March 21, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Eastern Michigan University's chapter of Students for Life, who were denied funding by the student government for their Genocide Awareness Project display.

The lawsuit argues the school should have given the group approximately $5,000 in funding for the display, which highlights the tragedy of abortion alongside the Holocaust, lynchings of blacks in the U.S., and genocide in Cambodia.

The ADF alleges EMU officials refused to allocate student activity fees to Students for Life based on the group’s “political or ideological” views, despite the fact that the university funds other groups involved in political and ideological speech.

Image

The lawsuit alleges the student government sent an e-mail to Students for Life explaining their reasoning for the denial: “The images you want to display are very controversial… (and) a little biased,” the e-mail said.

But in the lawsuit, ADF attorneys accuse EMU of funding many other politically and ideologically based groups, including those supporting “welfare rights, women’s and abortion rights, student activist training, and race-conscious issues, just to name a few.”

Their current actions are inconsistent and unfair, ADF says.

“Universities should encourage, not shut down, the free exchange of ideas,” said Senior Legal Counsel David Hacker in a statement. “The university funded the advocacy of other student organizations but singled out Students for Life for exclusion based purely upon its viewpoint.”

The lawsuit argues that the first amendment “prohibits content and viewpoint discrimination in a public university’s allocation of mandatory student fee funding.”

Click “like” if you want to end abortion!

“The constitutional freedoms of pro-life student organizations should be recognized by university officials just as they recognize those freedoms for other student groups,” said Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot. “We hope EMU revises its student funding policy to include all groups, regardless of their political or ideological viewpoint.”