It's rare when the modern-day Supreme Court makes a unanimous decision on any contentious issue. But today the entire Supreme Court made it clear that strings are always attached to tax dollars.
In a unanimous ruling, the Court said that even when universities did not single out the military, and rather banned all recruiters from campus who discriminate against gays and lesbians, they can still lose their federal tax dollars.
This is particularly troubling to the leadership of the largest LGBT organizations (and other socialist-leaning civil rights groups), because one of their primary strategies in the past twenty years has been to move various parts of the economy from the private sector to the public sector, so that nondiscrimination laws that apply to government employees and government contractors can be applied to more and more people.
Until the Solomon Amendment, which prohibited federal tax dollars from being spent at colleges and universities that don't allow military recruiters on campus, this strategy worked quite well. Now, as we watch the pendulum swing back, with a larger government than ever, but the leadership of that government being hostile to the interests of LGBT people, we're seeing that the Libertarian warning to the LGBT community was valid. The largest federal government ever now funnels tax dollars to anti-gay religious organizations via President Bush's "faith-based initiative," and private universites, suffering from a decades-long addiction to federal research money, no longer have the ability to set their own policies regarding LGBT equality.
Perhaps it's time for the LGBT community, and especially those largest organizations representing it, to listen to the Libertarian argument that a biologically-determined permanent minority should be skeptical of big government where there are no controls on the will of the majority.
