Good morning. I'm Mark Sovelle, in for Taylor Wilson. And this is five things you need to know. Monday, the 24th of July, 2023.

Today, the fight over LGBTQ plus rights to religious schools.

Also, summer fires cause the evacuation of a Greek vacation island and colleges turn to emergency contraception vending machines.

A group of plaintiffs are suing the US Department of Education, challenging a law that allows religious colleges to discriminate based on the sex of students and applicants.

USA Today's Supreme Court correspondent John Fritzie is here with the story. Thanks for joining me, John.

Hey, thank you.

So what is the genesis of this case?

Every business in the country, every college in the country, a lot of institutions in the country are barred from discriminating against people under federal anti-discrimination laws.

And the law issue here is called Title IX, and it says that colleges that receive federal funding may not discriminate on the basis of sex or age or other factors.

But there's an exception to that law. It's a religious exception. And what the law says is that universities and colleges that are tied to a religion don't have to follow that rule.

And so they are allowed to discriminate on these bases. If they feel like the students or faculty involved are not consistent with their religious beliefs.

And so this case involves LGBTQ plus individuals who either wanted to attend these schools or did attend these schools and either were denied application or were punished in some way,

reprimanded for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

John, tell us why this case is notable and where does the case sit now?

The case is sitting at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It's notable because there's this real tension in this nation right now in courts between religious rights and LGBTQ plus rights.

We see this in case after case. And what we see in most of these cases are the religious entities winning.

The religious entities of course have a first amendment protection. There's a part of the first amendment that says that people have the freedom to exercise their faith without intrusion from the government.

It's a situation where LGBTQ groups are sort of fighting back. They're sort of going on offense and saying, look, we're going to challenge this law and argue that it's not constitutional under equal protection and other parts of the Constitution.

In your opinion, is this case likely to be headed for the Supreme Court?

I think there's a good chance for it and this is an issue certainly that's gone up to the Supreme Court repeatedly in the past many years.

The most notable case recently is just this term was a case called 303 Creative that listeners are probably familiar with.

This case involved a web designer who wanted to decline to make wedding websites for same sex couples.

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