Free Republic

Private religious schools may have won a big victory Wednesday when the California Supreme Court declined to decide whether a so-called "Christian Conduct" rule prohibiting homosexuality violated the state's premier civil rights law. The high court's decision not to review a case out of Riverside County lets stand a lower court's ruling that the California Lutheran High School is not a business enterprise and, therefore, not subject to the state's 50-year-old Unruh Civil Rights Act. In a depublication request filed with the Supreme Court in March, the San Francisco-based American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California called the January ruling...

Riverside -- Two 16-year-old girls who were expelled from a private Lutheran high school because they were suspected of being lesbians have sued the school for invasion of privacy and discrimination. The lawsuit, filed last week in Riverside County Superior Court, seeks the girls' re-enrollment at the tiny California Lutheran High School, unspecified damages and an injunction barring the school from excluding gays and lesbians. The suit could be a test case in the state on whether religious schools can deny enrollment to gays and lesbians, said Richard Ackerman, a lawyer who is president of Temecula's Pro-Family Center, which focuses...