Civics: First Amendment, taxpayer subsidies and the Yale Law School

Ethan Beeman:

The Christian legal group has won nine Supreme Court cases in the past seven years, including Masterpiece Cakeshop. That’s the case where seven justices said Colorado showed “religious hostility” to cake designer Jack Phillips when it found that his refusal to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding violated the state’s antidiscrimination law.

The Yale chapter of the Federalist Society hosted Kristin Waggoner, the alliance lawyer who argued Masterpiece. When the chapter sent a school-wide email about the event, the campus LGBT group Outlaws and several other progressive groups called for a boycott, according to chapter member Aaron Haviland in The Federalist.

What the Federalist Society got was “over-the-top even by Yale standards,” Haviland wrote.

Two days before Waggoner’s event, the Outlaws asked the administration if students would be able to use Yale-funded public interest fellowships “to push discriminatory agendas during their summers,” according to The Daily Wire.

Open the Books:

1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

2. The Ivy League was the recipient of $25.73 billion worth of federal payments during this period: contracts ($1.37 billion), grants ($23.9 billion) and direct payments – student assistance ($460 million).

The First Amendment