The court seems to be going out of its way to NOT rock the boat too much in the last few actions….
The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a private Christian college’s bid to revive its lawsuit challenging a federal directive prohibiting housing discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
In a brief, unsigned order, the justices declined to take up the College of the Ozarks’s appeal of a lower ruling that found the school had no legal standing to move forward with its pre-enforcement challenge.
On the day he took office, President Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to interpret sex-discrimination provisions in various federal laws to protect sexual orientation and gender identity. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a directive the next month updating its interpretation of the Fair Housing Act (FHA).
College of the Ozarks, however, wishes to assign its dormitory housing assignments based on students’ biological sex, not their gender identity, to comport with the institution’s religious teachings.
The school sued the administration in April 2021 over the interpretation, but a trial judge and a divided appeals court panel found the college did not have legal standing because the school had not shown a concrete injury.
The college then appealed to the justices, contending the administration had denied the school a procedural right to comment on the proposal before implementing it. Lower courts had rejected that argument, noting that the school faced no imminent risk of enforcement.
“That result has mammoth implications,” the school’s attorneys wrote in court filings. “If HUD gets away with rewriting the FHA via the Directive, it has no incentive to ever go through the rule-making process. That eliminates judicial review until after an enforcement proceeding is complete and the regulated entity has already been harmed.”….