A Fresno County Superior Court jury has awarded $5.85 million in damages to Lindy Vivas, who won her discrimination suit against Fresno State University, which is part of the California State University system, the same as San Diego State University and Cal State San Marcos.

On July 11, Vivas proved to a jury that the school refused to renew her contract as the volleyball coach because of her advocacy of gender equity and her perceived sexual orientation.

The verdict was almost $2 million more than Vivas had sought.

After the CSU pays Vivas’ legal fees, and pays its own attorneys, this will cost taxpayers about $10 million.

The severity of the verdict suggests that CSU lawyers should have ordered the reinstatement of Vivas as soon as they learned of her firing. They should have fired those who discriminated against her.

Instead, it seems they mounted a vindictive and expensive litigation.

This must be particularly insulting to Roberta Achtenberg, chair of the CSU Board, who served as the first openly lesbian assistant secretary (for Housing) in the Clinton administration.

Nor does the decision bode well for students: $10 million translates into a loss of more than 100 faculty posts, and thousands of class offerings.

The verdict comes as no surprise to me, given the concerns I’ve raised here with regard to UC and CSU. Schools are failing miserably in efforts to end GLBT bias, particularly in athletics.

Beginning this year, the Legislature required colleges such as SDSU to ensure a hostility-free environment for gay and lesbian students. Also, CSU colleges may not do business with entities that don’t offer domestic partnership benefits. Our own State Sen. Christine Kehoe authored both measures, which the Governor signed.

These laws mean that CSU schools can no longer play schools like Air Force, Navy, Army because of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, or any other college that does not allow gay and lesbian students to be open. (Afterall, we don’t permit UC and CSU colleges to use tax money to play schools that practice race bias. SDSU would not send baseball coach Tony Gwynn and his team to play Bob Jones University, a school that has historically prohibited race-mixing. As Tony would say, “Ain’t gonna happen.”)

These “religious” schools expel students who are openly gay. Some have a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Some colleges, including BYU, now allow students to be open but not to engage in homosexual sex, just as heterosexual students cannot engage in premarital sex.

Kehoe’s bills were clearly designed to make the military end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or lose football revenue from playing our tax-supported athletic programs.

But, apparently, CSU officials think they don’t have to follow the law, because SDSU will continue to play Air Force, a college that doesn’t allow lesbians or gay men to be openly gay. SDSU will also play basketball and football games against religiously-affiliated colleges, like Brigham Young University, and Point Loma Nazarene – schools that do not provide domestic partnership benefits and that show bias against gay students because doing otherwise would, they say, violate their religious beliefs.

But as the Supreme Court indicated in Dale v. Boy Scouts, religious groups can only use that defense against the state when religious groups require all their members and students to be members of their faith and to abide by the same rules.

That’s hardly the case with most religious colleges. Most are like Notre Dame, a Catholic institution that accepts non-Catholics, and BYU, which accepts non-Mormons. Some of those non-believers are members of Baptist churches. They don’t follow the religious order of the schools they attend. Of course, without those players, Notre Dame and BYU wouldn’t be football powerhouses – Notre Dame without football?

But that’s the choice Sen. Kehoe, the Legislature, and the Governor gave such schools to ensure that Californians will not have their publicly-financed universities and programs used to subsidize and support discriminatory practices.