Justice Dept. backs church college aid in Colorado.The Bush administration is helping an evangelical Christian university in Colorado fight for state funding. In December, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief on behalf of Colorado Christian University Colorado Christian University (CCU) is an interdenominational evangelical Christian liberal arts university. More than 2,200 undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled at CCU’s main campus in Lakewood, Colorado, at regional centers throughout Colorado, and around the in its lawsuit challenging the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's (CCHE) refusal to allow the private religious school to participate in state-funded student financial aid programs. Represented by the Alliance Defense Fund The Alliance Defense Fund ("ADF") is a conservative Christian non-profit organization with the stated goal of "defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation. and the Christian Legal Society The Christian Legal Society (CLS), founded in 1961, is a nonprofit organization of lawyers, judges, law professors, and law students. The group's missions are to promote high ethical standards within the legal profession, to support its members' commitment to Christian professional lives, , the university sued the state commission in late 2004 arguing that denial of state funding violated the school's religious liberty rights and the Constitution's equal protection clause The Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. . The CCHE, however, says the state may not support "pervasively sectarian" schools, the Rocky Mountain News The Rocky Mountain News is a daily morning tabloid-format newspaper published in Denver, Colorado. It is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. (Despite Scripps still running the paper, it's the only newspaper in the Scripps family not to have the corporate lighthouse logo on reported in early January. In its brief, the Justice Department maintained that the U.S. Supreme Court has approved indirect funding of religious institutions. The Rocky, Mountain1 News also reported that the CCHE's executive director does not like the state law barring the public funding and has worked to change it. "As long as it's the law, I'm required to apply it," Rick O'Donnell told the newspaper. |
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