Salt Lake Fires a Blunderbuss : Banning all school clubs because of a gay one is absurd.

Salt Lake City’s Board of Education, unable to find a legal way to ban a high school club of gay and lesbian students from meeting on campus, has taken the extreme step of voting to ban all campus clubs, thus depriving hundreds of young people of facilities to discuss mutual interests ranging from skiing to foreign languages to religious study.

The board acted under enormous pressure from the state senate, which held what its president acknowledges was an illegal closed-door meeting with top educators on Jan. 30. At that meeting some senators equated the permission given for the gay and lesbian club to meet with a deliberate effort to undercut family values and promote homosexuality. In fact, school officials were simply complying with the 1985 federal Equal Access Act, a measure intended foremost to assure that Christian Bible clubs could use school facilities for extracurricular activities. Its chief sponsor was Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

The blanket ban on school clubs represents an absurdly malicious and destructive response to a small if undoubtedly controversial matter. It appears to be based on the assumption that a school’s recognition of the right of homosexual students to meet on campus amounts to endorsement of their activities, when in fact it is simply compliance with the law. It seems further to be based on the assumption--superstition might be more accurate--that the club would serve as a kind of recruiting office, seducing young people into a homosexual life they would otherwise have shunned.

Public officials are free to hold strong opinions, on homosexual clubs or anything else, as we all are. But when those views become the driving force behind a wildly disproportionate and wholly unnecessary policy, then neither the aims of the law nor the broad public interest are responsibly served.