Let us change names for the sake of argument. Suppose that Belief Group A and the majority of its membership, at the time of adoption of a constitution, believes that Practice X is in fact immoral and antithetical to the beliefs on which they're organized. [2] They are sincere in this belief such that any open Practitioner X has little practical chance of winning an open election. Finally, Belief Group A is in a minority as part of the Polity, and in fact the Polity as a whole is strongly supportive of Practice X.

There are two reasons I can see for Belief Group A to institute a policy requiring all of its candidates to abstain from Practice X, reasons I'll call Policy Entrenchment and Hijack Prevention.

Policy Entrenchment: In this scenario, the leadership of Belief Group A thinks that its members beliefs may be changing, and there may soon be at least a considerable minority of the group who does not object to Practice X. A constitutional requirement thus enshrines the present leadership's beliefs as group policy, and would require a massive change in membership to alter. (Even assuming that the constitution can be changed by majority vote, so long as the present members of Belief Group A are strongly anti-Practice X at adoption, a large shift will be necessary to change the policy.) In a Policy Entrenchment scenario, a restrictive leadership requirement thus functions something like a dead hand poison pill, and is objectionable for much the same reasons.

Hijack Prevention: Belief Group A fears that the views of its most active members are not changing, but its larger environment has shifted towards support of Practice X. It thus faces a choice: find some way to restrict its membership only to those already of a given viewpoint--at potentially high cost--or risk the chance that in a future election, a number of supporters of Practice X will "join" the group, vote in candidates who do not actually share Belief Group A's principles, and for all intents and purposes end the group.

Obviously, there may be other ways to prevent this kind of hijacking. The group could charge prohibitively high membership fees, for instance, although this may also discourage legitimate membership. They might limit voting to "active" members (those who have attended more than a certain number of events), but this imposes record-keeping requirements that may be wasteful for a smaller group. And of course, an environment of gentlemanly trust and acceptance would render this worry completely unnecessary, but we're talking about U.S. higher education today.

(There are a few other concerns outside of Hijack Prevention or Policy Entrenchment. Suppose that Practitioner X is not open about their activities (either within or outside the polity). The leadership of Belief Group A might wish to avoid any future candidate having an incentive to make those activities public to the Polity as a whole. But this is rather incidental to the reasons above.)

So the question then becomes: is it more likely that a group putting this rule in place is more worried about Policy Entrenchment or Hijack Prevention? To take my little blinders above off, do we think that the CLS is worried that there are vast numbers of members who wish to vote in a homosexual leadership, or that there will be in three or four years? Or do with think that some politically motivated electoral skullduggery on behalf of an activist or two is a reasonable fear? Perhaps one reason for passing general "antidiscrimination" rules isn't so much that there's a huge amount of real discrimination going on--actual candidates who really want to run actual groups in accordance with their members' wishes--but because it gives one side of a debate a funding club with which to hit their ideological opponents?

If the CLS dropped its membership requirements, would they be at risk of sudden infiltration by non-Christians who wish to wreck their fellowship? On the other hand, has the rule as it stands actually been used to block a candidate for leadership in the CLS who is both homosexual, somewhere within the rational definition of an active member and a halfway viable (i.e. more than protest) candidate? My initial impression is that hijack prevention is the more significant threat, but I've been unable to come up with a single documented case of a Christian law society being infiltrated in such a manner.

Which leads one to wonder whether there is any pragmatic reason to be concerned about this at present. True, the current Christian Legal Society constitution discriminates against homosexuals. It also bars wiccans, wholly heterosexual sybarites and myself, but I guess we don't have organized grievance groups. So long as none of us are actually active members, and no active but disqualified member is trying to run . . . where's the fire?

Ah well. However far the debate has descended, at least it hasn't reached the stage of Birmingham University, where the Student Union has apparently removed recognition from the Christian Union for many of the same underlying reasons. Supposedly among the Student Union's complaints? The use of the words "men" and "women" in the CU constitution might be seen as excluding transgendered and transsexual people.

[1]: It's funny that this typically comes up in the context of Christian organizations and homosexuality. One could imagine a radical feminist group wanting to restrict it leadership such that members of Conversio Virium (Columbia's BDSM discussion group) would be unable to hold leadership positions. Or come to think of it, a BDSM group wishing to restrict its leadership such that it isn't taken over by a traditional values coalition.) There's one case I've been shown in which the conflict was between different groups of Christians, but for the most part it's a religion and sexuality issue.

[2]: In case you think the name changing is needlessly pedantic, it's worth pointing out that one practice proscribed by the copy of the CLS constitution that I have is witchcraft. In theory, a group of witches (or wicca, members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, or what have you) could find themselves just as aggrieved by the CLS policy as anyone else. As a practical matter, this is unlikely at this law school: I don't think we have a wiccan group here.

Certainly, it's unlikely--though not impossible--that a wiccan would consider themselves Christian in the first place, but one could think of some forms of belief--albeit particularly rare--that some might consider part of Christianity and others would consider witchcraft. Yet by the time we get into wondering whether the Christian Legal Society's constitution would bar a practitioner of Enochian mysticism, we truly are beyond the bounds of the practical.