Sen. Hawley: Yale Law School should be stripped of federal funding for 'religious intolerance'

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Sen. Hawley suggests Yale be stripped of federal funding if 'religious intolerance' continues

Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, a Yale Law School alumnus, is calling for the attorney general to cut off federal funding if the school continues to 'discriminate against students of faith.'

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is calling on his alum, Yale Law School, to stop religious discrimination or lose their federal funding.

"Yale is discriminating against religious organizations," Hawley told "Fox & Friends" Wednesday morning. "They don't like religious organizations that want their members to follow their same religious beliefs. It's just religious intolerance. It's wrong, and by the way, it's not permitted under federal law."

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The Missouri senator fired off a two-page letter to the Trump administration Tuesday asking the Department of Justice to monitor Yale University and severe their funding if the law school continues to "target religious students for special disfavor."

Tensions first flared in February, when members of the Yale Federalist Society invited a lawyer from the Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF),  to speak on campus, a move that enraged Yale’s LGBT group “Outlaws," who characterized ADF as a "hate group."

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After students called for Yale to stop providing stipends to students who worked over the summer in ADF's Blackstone Legal Fellowship, YLS Dean Heather Gerken announced the school's nondiscrimination policy would affect those students.

"We've heard these kinds of complaints before," Hawley added. "All it really is is Yale has been looking for an opportunity to discriminate against religious organizations, that in many instances, provide free legal services to people in need and to discriminate against students of faith."

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Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, opened an investigation into Yale by the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution.

Yale said it takes the issue seriously and is taking steps to tackle the situation.

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"We take the issue of religious accommodations extremely seriously," Yale Law School said in a statement. "We have put in place an ideologically and religiously diverse committee to discuss this very issue and we are deliberating purposefully with a number of organizations to work out the details of those accommodations."

But Hawley isn't convinced.

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"It sounds like Yale now has been exposed for what they're doing and now they're trying to backtrack," Hawley added. "We're not going to trust anything. I want to see the details of their policy. I want to see that they are treating religious students and religious organizations in the same way they treat every other legal organization and every other student, and if Yale doesn't do that...they should have their federal funding stripped."

The Yale Law School alumnus said the situation is only getting worse and worse as the school builds up multibillion-dollar endowments.

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"They're taking all this taxpayer money. They're getting rich off of it," he said. "This isn't right."