More on Vanderbilt, student groups, and discrimination

The Wall Street Journal had a good op-ed, a few days ago, on the situation at Vanderbilt.  As the title suggests, Vanderbilt's aggressive position reflects a misunderstanding of, or a misapplication of, the non-discrimination norm.  As I wrote, in this Public Discourse essay:

Like other controversies involving, for example, the Boy Scouts, or the Christian Legal Society, the goings-on at Vanderbilt reveal a troubling confusion about “discrimination,” a confusion that, as it spreads, will undermine religious freedom, institutional pluralism, and civil society. This confusion travels with a deeply illiberal failure to appreciate that the kind of liberal democracy we should embrace is not “total” or “comprehensive”; in Lawrence Alexander’s words, it is not “liberalism all the way down,” and it does not insist that the rules that govern in the political sphere and context—non-discrimination, neutrality, “all comers”, etc.—need to, or even should, govern in other spheres and contexts.