Private: SUPREME COURT'S SOLOMON AMENDMENT- RULING

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, has upheld the controversial Solomon Amendment, which requires colleges and universities to give military recruiters equal access to students as other employers or face losing all federal funding. The Court said, "We [] read the Solomon Amendment the way both the Government and FAIR interpret it. It is insufficient for a law school to treat the military as it treats all other employers who violate its nondiscrimination policy. Under the statute, military recruiters must be given the same access as recruiters who comply with the policy." SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston calls the decision a "sweeping legal victory for the U.S. military." Military recruiters had been excluded from law school campuses across the nation because the schools felt that the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Policy" essentially barred homosexuals from serving in the military. 3rd circuit court of appeals had struck down the Solomon Amendment as unconstitutional. The various law schools that brought the suit argued the use of federal funding essentially forced them to associate with military recruiters and compelled their speech, thereby violating their First Amendment Rights. The Court disagreed. In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, the court argued, "A military recruiter's mere presence on campus does not violate a law school's right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter's message." Roberts added, "Students and faculty are free to associate to voice their disapproval of the military's message. Recruiters are, by definition, outsiders who come onto campus for the limited purpose of trying to hire students - not to become members of the school's expressive association." The explained this position by stating, "A law school's recruiting services lack the expressive quality of a parade, a newsletter, or the editorial page of a newspaper; its accommodation of a military recruiter's message is not compelled speech because the accommodation does not sufficiently interfere with any message of the school."
The opinion can be found here.