No, actually it's true. A California case, Evans v. Berkley, that resulted when the city of Berkley stopped providing free use of a marina to the Sea Scouts because of their policy towards homosexuals. The California Supreme Court ruled in favor of Berkley and against the Scouts and said that the city had done nothing wrong and said, "We agree with Berkeley and the Court of Appeal that a government entity may constitutionally require a recipient of funding or subsidy to provide written, unambiguous assurances of compliance with a generally applicable nondiscrimination policy. We further agree Berkeley reasonably concluded the Sea Scouts did not and could not provide satisfactory assurances because of their required adherence to BSA’s discriminatory policies." When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, the court rejected the appeal without comment, and let the lower ruling stand.
I am familiar with that situation. My issue is with the sentence from the news article that you quoted, which said, "Unlike the scouts, public officials are also bound by a line of Supreme Court opinions barring taxpayer support of any group that discriminates."
This language is so entirely overbroad, it is meaningless. First, the City Council has the right to pass its own laws and additions to its discrimination statutes, and is not bound by the terms of a suit over a marina in California. They would be "bound" only if someone sued the Phila City Council all the way to the Supreme Court and the SCOTUS bound them based on the terms of a lawsuit in Philadelphia.
The civil rights industry in this nation accepts no law or decision as final, provided they are fighting on the left — an inherent abuse.
Secondly, the phrase "any group that discriminates" is bogus. A wife discriminates against men other than her husband who want to have sex with her. A homeowner discriminates against persons who want to enter his property uninvited. Discrimination has become a code word for "bad" and "evil", when it is fundamentally a life-supporting mental faculty that makes you put your hat on your own head and not someone else's.
As another example of the media's slant on issues, the recent court ruling in Maryland that Maryland's marriage law does not constitute illegal discrimination was assailed in print as "court rules against gay marriage", when in fact the court did nothing of the kind, and even indicated in the decision that the definition of marriage was constitutionally the work of the legislature, not the courts.
To quote the sage of Philadelphia, Ben Franklin, "Believe half of what you see and none of what you read."