Located in upper Manhattan, Yeshiva University has always sought to be both a university in the full sense of the world and an Orthodox yeshiva. While its undergraduates are almost entirely observant Jews, most of whom undertake a rigorous program of religious study, its graduate and professional schools have many non-Jewish students. The tensions between these aspects of its mission have come to the fore in the ongoing controversy over whether it should recognize a club for gay and lesbian students. YU’s decision not to recognize the student group has led it to petition the Supreme Court. Ed Whelan explains the case, and why it deserves a hearing from the country’s highest judicial body:

The particular dispute arises from an effort by Yeshiva students to create an undergraduate LGBTQ club—and to do so precisely in order to alter Yeshiva’s religious environment—but the issue would be exactly the same if, say, other students wanted to form a Jews for Jesus club: does Yeshiva have the religious freedom to implement its beliefs about how to form its undergraduate students in Torah values?

A New York trial court ruled that the New York City Human Rights Law requires Yeshiva to recognize an official Pride Alliance club. It has entered a permanent injunction against Yeshiva, and New York’s higher courts have denied Yeshiva’s requests for emergency relief. The club application process is now open, so absent emergency relief from the Supreme Court, the permanent injunction will require Yeshiva to approve the club “immediately.”

Yeshiva compellingly argues that the lower court’s order tramples its First Amendment autonomy as a religious institution.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”