The New Morality Police march on. Their latest prisoners: Intervarsity Fellowship and Gordon College.
Intervarsity Christian Fellowship was stripped of its recognized student group status by every campus of California State University, simply on the grounds that the group refused to allow non-Christians to become leaders of the fellowship. Terribly scandalous, huh? This is quite similar to the unceremonious booting that the Christian student group at Bowdoin College experienced earlier this year. The message is clear: Your Christian group is welcome only if it is willing to be non-Christian.
Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that the fulcrum on which this policing operates is sexual ethics, particularly homosexuality and gender identity. Bowdoin and Cal State have realized that evangelical student groups might contain members who transgress cultural moral code on these issues. Rather than simply pulling a Mozilla and risking too much public outcry, the schools (more are to come, I’m sure) have sought to undermine the confessional orientation of evangelical groups from the inside out. We should reflect on the fact that this is happening despite zero evidence or complaints of actual discrimination concerning these students. This isn’t first response, it’s search and destroy.
Gordon College, meanwhile, has lost a partnership with a local school district. Education majors at Gordon will no longer be welcome in schools in Lynn County, because the president of Gordon (a confessional Christian school) asked President Obama for an exemption from the recent anti-discrimination executive order. Michael Lindsay thinks his evangelical school should be allowed to hire evangelical staff. In the eyes of Lynn County, that makes him a bigot.
Andrew Walker has seen it before:
This refrain is becoming all too common: A Christian expresses belief that homosexual actions are sinful. The offended party then files a complaint with an adjudicating authority. And since being offended is the greatest threat to young adult self-esteem in America, and in the name of non-discrimination, the logical step, of course, is to discriminate in the name of discrimination.
The reason no one on the Left sees this as bizarre is because they know what conservatives are only starting to guess. The point is not “equality,” “diversity” or “tolerance;” the point is a New Morality. It’s not relativism but religion. Dissent is heresy and heretics must pay the price.