The U.S. Education Department accepted Baylor University’s request for exemption from Title IX’s sexual harassment provision after the private Baptist school asked to dismiss discrimination complaints filed by LGBTQ+ students that the university said were “inconsistent” with the institution’s religious values.
“For the first time in Title IX’s history, a federally-funded university has been given special permission, by the Biden Administration no less, to allow its LGBTQIA+ students to be sexually harassed,” wrote Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, in a statement.
In 2021, the nonprofit filed a Title IX complaint on behalf of former student Veronica Bonifacio Penales, in which she accused the university of tolerating sexual harassment after the school failed to address homophobic slurs she received from other students on campus and social media.
Over the past two years, religious universities invoking their right to exemption from certain Title IX dispositions in the name of religious freedom has been viewed by many LGBTQ advocates as a mechanism to avoid granting equal treatment and protection to queer students attending religious institutions.
Elizabeth Reiner Platt, director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School, told the Texas Tribune that the decision was “the latest example of religious exemptions being expanded in ways that undermine equality rights.”
Through this request, the private Christian university obtained the guarantee “that the belief in or practice of its religious tenets by the University or its students would not constitute unwelcome conduct,” as it is characterized in Title IX’s definition of sexual harassment.
The direct consequences of this decision are still unclear and will depend on how the federal agency will apply it to specific cases, said Joe Baxter, REAP’s deputy director.