Common sense wins out

It’s nice to see the Supreme Court can still agree on common sense issues such as this one.

The Supreme Court yesterday unanimously upheld a federal law that forces colleges and universities to permit military recruiting on campus, despite the schools' objections to the Pentagon ban on openly gay people serving in the armed forces....

The Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) -- a coalition of law schools and professors that formed to sue the government -- had said the law "compelled speech" that made it appear schools were endorsing the government's exclusion of acknowledged gays in the military, thus violating the schools' right to free speech under the First Amendment.

But in writing for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that Solomon "neither limits what law schools may say nor requires them to say anything."

"Law schools remain free under the statute to express whatever views they may have on the military's congressionally mandated employment policy. . . . Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with any speech by recruiters and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military's policies," Roberts wrote.