When some Baylor students wanted to create an on-campus forum for sexuality, I'm sure their first thought was What better place to educate students on issues relevant to their lives than a twenty-first century institution of higher education? But here's where they went wrong: while it is true that Baylor meets many of the criteria for a "twenty-first century institution of higher education" - classrooms, overpriced textbooks, omnipresent displays of testosterone and wealth - it fails to meet the most important one. No, it's not lots and lots of dormitory sex, which, though openly denied by the administration, is as balls-to-the-wall as any dense community of unsupervised adolescents. Actually, Baylor fails the the twenty-first century part.
Baylor's medieval code of conduct forbids talking about anything that would make a nun squirm, including minority sexual practices. You might say this is unnecessarily rigid and dogmatic of them, but you should know they at least tried using a "nothing that would make a priest squirm" standard, which left some wide-open, shall we say, loopholes. Anyway, despite the odds against them, proponents of the Sexual Identity Forum attempted to obtain support from several faculty members, including the one who wrote this not-so welcoming e-mail in response: http://www.sifembears.com/?p=370. Apparently, such a group wrongfully discriminates against the Christians and their God-given right to discriminate against people who disagree with them. I've listed some of the email's highlights below, along with my own responses.
First, the nature of human sexuality and the normativity of conjugal love is a settled question in the Christian tradition.
Anytime you use words like “nature” and “normativity,” you’re asking for someone to whip out a textbook or a mountain of research publications and embarrass you with facts. Why? Because words like these are only useful in the context of science, which concerns itself with the study of - any guesses? - facts of nature.
[The terms you employ] reveal a deep hostility to those who believe that homosexual conduct is disordered: “hate crimes,” “homophobia,” and “LGBT suicide.”
I’d love to hear your theory on the “nature” of suicide, but last I checked when an LGBT individual kills him or herself, it qualifies as an LGBT suicide. These suicides almost invariably follow years of abuse, bullying, and ostracism. But maybe you’ve thought of a better way to explain it, like, I don’t know, “God’s will” or “the wages of sin is death.” Of course, “the enduring love of Christ for humanity” sounds much better than “homophobic aggression,” so, for the sake of your offering plate, keep preaching it from your end.
Thus, what you are suggesting is that Baylor treat its moral theology as if it were something its leadership can simply will not to believe. But that’s not the way moral theology works. It is not a commodity that is subject to our will. It is something normative to which our wills should be subject.
Well, the words “willful ignorance” come to mind. But, really, is free will not a core tenet of Christian theology? How else could you fit in the part about sentencing people to an eternity of suffering for their choices, say if they choose to focus on the natural instead of the supernatural or choose to misspell his name as Allah or choose to be born in a remote village in the Amazon where people have never heard of him. I suppose God is currently willing me to not believe in him or your silly doctrines. Yep, little atheist me, doing the will of my not-really-Lord-and-Savior without even breaking a sweat. And here you are, wasting all that time with crackers and grape Kool-aid.
In a world of pluralism and diversity, institutions like Baylor should be allowed to flourish and advance their self-understanding without being mocked, ridiculed, and accused of bad faith by those who do not share that understanding.
I absolutely love when the persecuting majority feels persecuted. It’s like an episode of that great eighties sit-com starring Tony Danza: Who’s the Fuhrer?
The university would no more approve of a group that denies the Christian understanding of the proper employment of our sexual powers than it would approve of a group that denied the periodical table or advanced racial segregation.
Not so long ago, if I’m not mistaken, seemingly crazy things like racial segregation and anti-science attitudes were widely accepted by many Christians. Yep, I just checked – it still holds as of twenty-three seconds ago, more or less.
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