"Mormon Student, Justice, ACLU Join Up"

[Ed Darrell]

The service academies used to do the same thing -- a cadet at the Air Force Academy, for example, would have to choose between a "mission call" from the LDS church and continuing to graduation, with the added kicker that if he took the mission call, he'd owe a couple of years of service or thousands of dollars for the time he'd spent at the Academy.
   
  Wisely, I think, the service academies adopted a policy of letting students take the two years for a religious mission, then return to their military studies.  
   
  Why can't West Virginia do the same?  Now, should federal law require it?  If West Virginia doesn't have a Blaine amendment in its constitution, doesn't its state constitution require it, too?
   
  Ed Darrell
  Dallas

"Volokh, Eugene" <VOLOKH at law.ucla.edu> wrote:
  Any thoughts on this?


http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Aug25/0,4670,ReligionLawsuitScholarship
,00.html

The Justice Department is joining the American Civil Liberties Union in
backing a student who lost his state-funded merit-based scholarship
because he left college to serve a two-year church mission.

The department's Civil Rights Division filed a friend-of-the-court brief
Friday in U.S. District Court in Charleston on behalf of David Haws, a
student at West Virginia University.

Haws, a Mormon, is suing a state scholarship board, alleging it violated
his First Amendment right to freely exercise his religion. His attorney
argues that by denying Haws' request for a leave of absence, the board
forced him to choose between his religion and his scholarship through a
state program, known as PROMISE.

The Justice Department noted that the PROMISE Board grants deferments
for military and community service, and that by denying a deferral for
religious purposes, the board was placing a lower value on religious
deferments....
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