Bear Flag League buddy (and advertiser, and cross-town nemesis) Boi From Troy wants to call attention to a student at Pepperdine University named Grant Turck who has been denied requests to start first a "gay student organization" and then a "Students Against Homophobia" club. BFT believes that these rejections demonstrate homophobia, but according to Dictionary.com that word means:
1. Fear of or contempt for lesbians and gay men.I don't think the rejections of Mr. Turck's two proposed organizations were based on fear or contempt; if anything, it appears that Mr. Turck holds the beliefs of Pepperdine University in contempt and is purposefully seeking to undermine them.
2. Behavior based on such a feeling.
I've said it before: Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) have anything but love for homosexuals. Pepperdine isn't expelling Mr. Turck because he's gay, but my understanding is that as a private institution it would be legally free to do so. Although I don't know many details about this case, it's easy for me to put myself in the place of the university administration and explain the likely motivation behind their actions.
I wrote before:
Why, then, do many Christians see homosexuality and homosexuals as particularly evil? Theologically, we shouldn't. The real difficulty, however, is that although most of us acknowledge the wrongfulness of our many lies, thefts, and boasts, many people deny the wrongness of homosexuality. Our culture glorifies many types of evil, but individually we mostly agree that greed, slander, gossip, and the rest are bad and that we should not participate in them. However, when it comes to homosexuality, many people argue that it's not wrong at all; and unless we are willing to confess the evil of our actions, God will not forgive us. We must be willing to submit ourselves to God's dictates on right and wrong, and we must be willing to agree with him when he condemns our actions.Pepperdine doesn't hate Mr. Turck, but they don't want him to form an organization based around excusing/promoting/glorifying behavior they see to be morally wrong. The administrators would likewise certainly reject clubs whose purposes were to promote the acceptance of extramarital heterosexual sex, theft, lying, gossip, or any number of other behaviors that are contrary to standard Christian theology. Not because Christians hate or fear people who do these things, but because they don't want to contribute to their acceptance.
It seems clear to me that Mr. Turck isn't merely advocating tolerance for homosexuals. Christians should all agree that homosexuals should be loved as God's children and that homosexuality should be politically tolerated. The problem arises when advocating tolerance edges into advocating acceptance and celebration.
I believe it's disingenuous for homosexuals to label anyone who doesn't enthusiastically approve of homosexuality as a homophobic bigot. In a free society, Mr. Turck should be allowed to like whomever and whatever he wants, and Pepperdine should be allowed to promote whatever activities it wants. Mr. Turck and his parents are customers of Pepperdine University, and if they don't like the product it produces they should find another supplier.
Update:
Aaron the Liberal Slayer always impresses me with his take on religious issues. He's Jewish and I'm Christian, but when it comes to the actual details of day-to-day morality we agree on a lot of things.
I agree with your general argument, but I will say, as I have before, that I consider usury, gambling, and failing to tithe to be sins that many Christian don't repent of, often because they have a different understanding of Biblical perspectives in those areas. Although one cannot go on sinning with abandon and a lack of repentance, we needn't have a perfect understanding of what consitutes sin in order to be saved. God is interested in the heart and the actions a changed heart can lead to. He isn't concerned with making repentance into a legalism.
I consider the death penalty morally unacceptable and all executions sinful; however, I respect that there are Christians who have a different understanding.
MW: You're a scary judge of timing, my friend. Just this week, engaged in debate over websites that offer a "safe" Christian environment for those "predisposed" to "alternative" lifestyles, I used the same point.
It is not so much that one sin can be "worse" than another. It is the sheer depravity revealed by those who seek to swing the pendulum the other way by advocating the message that God never condemned the homosexual lifestyle.
These are scary, yet forewarned times we live in.
"The real difficulty, however, is that although most of us acknowledge the wrongfulness of our many lies, thefts, and boasts, many people deny the wrongness of homosexuality."
There's some truth in this, but I think there's another more important factor - for many heterosexual people, homosexual behavior is just kind of repulsive, leading them to confuse the "yuck factor" with increased sinfulness.
In addition, there's the bonus "cheap grace" value of a sin they themselves are not tempted to commit and therefore find easy to condemn. This was the tendency Jesus warned us about when he told us to worry more about the log in our eye and the dust in our neighbor's.
The fact is, many Christians have treated homosexual behaviour as a uniquely serious form of sexual sin for far longer than any socially significant effort to redefine it as moral, normal or natural has existed. The sheer frustration of seeing sin defined as normality and virtue as a mental illness is just a recent irritant.
VAM: Oh sure, that's a part of it too, but most people don't use "it's yucky" as a serious rationalization. It may be a large part of the real, underlying, motive for disapproval, however.
Michael, you make the point just right. There are big differences between:
1. asserting your freedom to do something immoral,
2. arguing that your immoral act isn't immoral, and
3. threatening and attacking those who refuse to agree that your immoral act is immoral.
Edit:
3. threatening and attacking those who refuse to agree that your immoral act isn't immoral.
Is it that difficult for you guys to see that the anus isn't meant to be an i/o device?
just recently,, i learned that a priest here in sweden got 2 months in the slammer for preaching that Homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of god.
hows that for freedom of speach,, huh ? LOL this little puny country is totaly whacked. i dont know how other see us, but i can tell you one thing, sweden is NOT an democracy,, every morning i look at the sky and hope to see the BALD EAGLE ,, swooping down to liberate us from this Dictatorship. =(