Christian Landlord Court Decision--An Example of Judicial Double-Standard?

Christian Landlord Court Decision--An Example of Judicial Double-Standard?

By Chad Groening
AFR News
August 15, 2000

(AgapePress) - The chief counsel for the American Family Association's Center for Law and Policy says a recent ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is just another example of the double-standard in our judicial system.

By a 10-to-1 margin, the Ninth Appeals Court case aside a lower court ruling which upheld the right of Christian landlords to reject tenants for moral reasons. The decision came on procedural grounds because no tenants actually filed a complaint against landlords under the Alaska law, and the State had never initiated proceedings against any landlords.

Attorney Steve Crampton of the AFA Center for Law and Policy says the court is demonstrating a double-standard.

"What you have here is one of those double-standards again," Crampton says. "There's one set of rules that apply to liberal-type issues, being brought--as the abortion cases are--to challenge restrictions on abortion. Those cases, the court will hear."

"In the conservative arena, by contrast--where Christian landlords are the ones [who] are complaining about the constitutionality of a law--the court says, 'Sorry, we're not going to hear that today.' "

For example, Crampton says the court was perfectly willing to allow a preemptive ruling in an abortion case in Nebraska.

"In the recent partial birth abortion decision [Stenberg vs. Carhart] ...that, too, just like this one, was a pre-enforcement facial challenge to the constitutionality of a state statute," he says. "But [the partial birth abortion case] was heard by the full court--indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court. It was no problem, in the Supreme Court's mind, that the statute had not been applied against Carhart."

Crampton says the court has set new standards that clearly protect homosexuals while discriminating against those who do not agree with their lifestyle. The attorney says even though Christians will continue to face this kind of discrimination in the courts, they must continue to use the legal system and hope that they can find judges who base their decisions on the law and not on a liberal political agenda.