Congratulations to the girls basketball team from Falls Church’s Meridian High School for making it to the final state Class 3 championship game in Richmond last week. It bodes well for the future as many players on that team will be back again next year. This year, the team lost by a razor-thin margin in the last minute, 44-43, to Lynchburg’s Liberty Christian Academy (LCA), a private school. The Meridian effort was described as a “valiant upset bid” by area media.

But the game has left a lot of questions about Liberty Christian’s qualifications for participating as a private school in the Virginia High School League (VHSL). Founded by the late, controversial right-wing religious figure, Jerry Falwell, LCA filed an antitrust lawsuit against the VHSL in 2015 seeking $1.5 million in damages in an effort to gain entry into its playoffs, as reported in last week’s News-Press. An emergency meeting of the VHSL was held at the time, and a vote was taken to avert the damages by admitting the school into the VHSL.

While that tactic was considered controversial in its own right, LCA has gone on to what are considered violations of VHSL standards, including a blatant disregard for the Virginia Standards of Learning and its Common Core standards, instead counting itself committed to academic standards “through a Biblical framework.”

A closer look at the school’s website reveals that this so-called “Biblical framework” justifies blatant discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, in particular, in violation of both federal and state law. The website states, “As a Christian ministry birthed by (Falwell’s) Thomas Road Baptist Church with the same doctrinal statement, LCA adheres to Biblical teaching regarding homosexual practices and transgender lifestyles. LCA does not employ teachers, nor does it admit or retain students, who are engaged in homosexual or bisexual practices, or have a transgender or transsexual lifestyle.”

While this affirmation of its practice of blatant discrimination should be sufficient in its own right to disqualify the school from participation in the VHSL, it is also reported that the school engages in another violation in the form of the recruitment of athletes to play for its teams in VHSL competitions. The star of the school in the high school girls’ basketball playoffs, for example, hails from distant San Diego, California, and has already been accepted on an athletic scholarship to play for Falwell’s Liberty University, down the street from the LCA.

So, notwithstanding the legal and financial pressures brought against the VHSL in 2015 to coerce it to accept LCA into its ranks, this is nine years later, and a lot has changed in the meantime in terms of advancing anti-discrimination standards in public life, including in education.

LCA can indeed propagate discriminatory values, but not in a way that interferes with public policy. In the 1960s, when Brigham Young University touted anti-black prejudices, its policies changed when rival schools refused to compete in athletics with it.