It took the United States Supreme Court to knock some sense into GSB. Last year, the Government of the Student Body voted to change its bylaws and ended its prohibition of funding religious student organizations.

This was in response to a court case involving another university that also singled out and refused to fund student organizations if they had a religious affiliation.

The high court saw this discrimination going on and said, “You can’t do that; religious discrimination is unconstitutional.”

The First Amendment, contrary to what some activists and administrators proclaim, does not condemn religion as some sort of social toxin that needs to be driven out of public life.

It guarantees freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion.

Even if some stridently secular people may feel uncomfortable when religion is discussed, they don’t have the right to make special restrictions against people of faith.

The publicity that resulted when student governments around the country, including Iowa State’s, began dropping their discriminatory bans on funding religious student organizations has gotten some people wondering about the future of mandatory student fees.

At issue is the legitimacy of having mandatory student fees to fund campus groups as a requirement for attending a public university.

For example, should a nuclear engineering student be forced to fund an anti-nuke club?

The same freedom-of-association issues that come up surrounding using union-dues to support partisan causes also exist for mandatory fees that fund student groups.

However, while it is often possible to do some paperwork and drop out of a union while keeping your job, you currently cannot avoid financially supporting student organizations you strongly object to and still remain a full-time student.

But why not? It is an interesting question to ask. The handful of students on the GSB finance committee currently allocate money to student groups, and then the GSB Senate approves the allocation. Why can’t students decide where they want their own money to go — or not go?

Is there a danger that students would support the “wrong” groups too much or the “right” groups not enough with their money?

The technical requirements for students to allocate their own fee money are trivial. A form can be created for students to fill out. Then, either using a voting booth (as in GSB general elections) or by having students stop by the GSB office in the Memorial Union, students could make their preferences known.

Maybe an electronic method could be developed so this could be done over the computer system. Regardless of the exact form it would take, a workable system could certainly be found.

Students could then have the option of having the portion of their own fee money that normally goes to student groups go to those groups they support.

Want to give your student fee money to the Potato Appreciation Club? Go ahead. The Future Podiatrists of America? Go ahead. Whatever money is left in the pot afterwards can then be divided up among student groups by GSB. GSB would also still decide on the allocations for the student fee recipients that are not student organizations.

My guess is that the GSB finance committee would dislike a proposal like this.

After all, spending other people’s money is fun, and it is rare to find a bureaucracy that wants to reduce its control.

Students should nonetheless be given an opportunity to have their fee money spent on student organizations they wish to support. It is, after all, their own money.

Forcing students to pay money out of their own pockets to support campus organizations they object to should be reconsidered.

But GSB should not be allowed to identify “controversial” groups to zero-fund as they have in the past by prohibiting funding for religious student organizations.

Instead, individual students should be allowed to support whatever student organizations they want to by voting for them with their own student fee dollars.

GSB needs to create a mechanism for them to do just that.

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Benjamin Studenski is a senior in industrial engineering from Hastings, Minn.