To stay on campus, CLS had to sue, and it did so through its attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and CLS Center for Law & Religious Freedom. After all, there was no democratic safeguard upon which the chapter could rely. No one actually votes for the dean, and bureaucracies are often several steps removed from even the most cursory legislative oversight. The trial court ruled against the students, buying the school's "benefits" argument, and the 9th Circuit affirmed in a two-sentence opinion. Because this decision conflicted with decisions in other cases (actually every other case outside the 9th Circuit) and because it deals with vital issues regarding the limits of government authority, the Supreme Court took it up to review.
So, is it really the case that CLS is merely crying over lost "benefits?" Can a university attach such coercive strings to after-hours access to empty classrooms? Philosophically and legally, the answer should be a resounding "no."
Philosophically, the Hastings argument runs directly against the very notion of a government "of the people and by the people." It is simply not the case that the government exists and owns assets separate and apart from its citizens - assets that it can use to accomplish whatever agenda it chooses. In fact, Hastings is denying students access to their own classrooms and funding - classrooms they pay for with their tuition dollars and funding they create with their own money. The proper role of the government is to safeguard the citizens' assets, not to exclude some from public property for the sake of approving or disapproving religious beliefs.
Legally, the Supreme Court has long understood this reality, even to the point of holding in 1972 that a potentially violent student organization - the Students for a Democratic Society, a group that had shut down campuses from coast to coast - had a freedom-of-association interest in access to university facilities. The court also held that the government cannot do indirectly those things that it's prohibited from doing directly. This 1972 case, called Healy v. James, should govern the Christian Legal Society's case.
After all, if the government can't directly tell a religious organization that it is not allowed to limit its voting membership or leadership to people who share its faith (who has ever heard of a Muslim rabbi?), then it can't do so indirectly by denying citizens access to their own classrooms and their own money.
How much can our leviathan government use its control over public property and your money to control your speech? To suppress your beliefs? We will soon know the answer.