Biden administration confirms Baptist college’s religious exemption to anti-sexual harassment law

The U.S. Department of Education (DoE) has confirmed a private Christian university’s religious exemption to Title IX’s policies banning anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and sexual harassment, after having been accused of doing nothing to stop sexual harassment of LGBTQ+ students.

In a July 25 letter to Baylor University President Linda A. Livingstone, Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary at the DoE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), confirmed that the university is exempt from certain Title IX provisions, including those regarding sexual harassment, “to the extent that they are inconsistent with the University’s religious tenets.”

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According to The Messenger, Baylor appears to be the first university ever to request a religious exemption from Title IX’s sexual harassment protections as well as the first to receive such an exemption from the DoE.

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“It doesn’t appear to meet a wholesale exemption from sexual harassment regulations, but the language is really vague in general,” Paul Carlos Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, told the Texas Tribune.

Lhamon’s letter was in response to a May 1 letter from Livingstone responding to four complaints filed with the OCR in 2021 against the private Baptist research university located in Waco, Texas. “These complaints must be dismissed because the allegations directly implicate Baylor’s religious exemption from Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX), as well as the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution and other laws,” Livingstone wrote.

One of the complaints cited by Livingstone claimed that Baylor violated Title IX regulations in its “alleged response to notice that students were subjected to harassment based on their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.” As the Texas Tribune notes, former Baylor student Veronica Penales filed a Title IX complaint in 2021 claiming that the university did nothing to address anti-LGBTQ+ harassment she faced from fellow students. Other complaints noted in Livingstone’s letter had to do with Baylor’s decision to deny an official charter to an LGBTQ+ student organization and its pressure on university media not to report on LGBTQ+ events and protests.

“Because each of Baylor’s rules and policies at issue derives from Baylor’s religious tenets as a Baptist university, Baylor’s enforcement of those rules and policies is fully exempt from any requirements under Title IX relating to sexual orientation or gender identity,” Livingstone wrote.

In an August 10 tweet, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project noted that Livingstone “specifically sought assurance that the university and its students could not be accused of sexual harassment for their behavior towards LGBTQIA+ people.”

Baylor University specifically sought assurance that the university and its students could not be accused of sexual harassment for their behavior towards LGBTQIA+ people.

Your religious tenets should not require you to act in a way that may be classified as sexual harassment.

— Religious Exemption Accountability Project (@REAP_LGBTQ) August 10, 2023

While Lhamon’s letter recognized Baylor’s religious exemption, she wrote that the DoE would investigate any complaints against the university to determine whether the allegations are covered by the exemption.

In a statement, Elizabeth Reiner Platt, director of Columbia Law School’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project said that the DoE’s decision “is the latest example of religious exemptions being expanded in ways that undermine equality rights and, ultimately, harm religious communities.”