Civil rights laws currently protect the college's right to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion, and to impose religious lifestyle standards on employees. These laws reflect the separation of church and state. Abandon that principle, as CUC urges, in favor of neutrality, and there are powerful forces in our society eager to impose nondiscrimination laws on the church. We have already faced these efforts on the state level. Formal neutrality threatens to destroy the institutional autonomy of the church, and with it, the freedom of the church to define itself and to advance its mission through employees specially selected for that purpose.
Formal neutrality is, therefore, the enemy of religious liberty.
CUC contends that denying state aid to pervasively sectarian schools is discriminatory. Separation of church and state denies aid to religious schools, while also protecting them from invasive regulation. This is fair. CUC wants the aid, but not the regulation. Catholic colleges are permitted to receive the aid not because of a Catholic attorney general, as CUC contends, but because the U.S. Supreme Court already found that these schools had substantially secularized.