An El Cajon Christian preschool is suing the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), alleging that the agency unconstitutionally barred the school from taking part in a state program to provide food to low-income children.
The Church of Compassion and its Dayspring Christian Learning Center filed the federal lawsuit in the Southern District of California last month, arguing that the CDSS decided to cut the school’s state funds for the food program as a result of the school’s failure to embrace the state’s nondiscrimination policy on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).
The school’s staff handbook disallows “lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender lifestyles," according to the legal complaint.
“The California Department of Social Services canceled the food program at Dayspring, which serves needy immigrant children, precisely because the Church of Compassion refused to capitulate to the state’s new unprecedented mandate that the church must abandon 2,000 years of orthodox Christian beliefs about human sexuality,” Dean Broyles, chief counsel for the National Center for Law & Policy, told the Southern California Record in an email.
Broyles, the plaintiff’s lead counsel, said the lawsuit aims to safeguard the rights of hundreds of faith-based service providers in California that work to help the poor in their communities.
“Constitutionally, the state simply does not have the jurisdiction to control a church’s sincerely held religious beliefs and practices, nor force faith-based institutions to adopt the state’s new philosophical and ‘religious’ feelings and beliefs about human sexuality,” he said.
The lawsuit notes that the U.S. Department of Agriculture works to accommodate religious organizations by providing exemptions under Title IX to religious schools whose SOGI convictions may differ with those of the USDA or the federal government.
“By implementing the CDSS’ new inflexible mandates, the state of California brazenly attempts to coercively force the church and preschool to completely surrender and waive their sincerely held orthodox Christian religious beliefs and practices regarding human sexuality,” the complaint says.
The CDSS declined to comment on the litigation, which argues that the department’s directives violate the rights guaranteed to religious organizations under the First Amendment.