Author: Glen

I some­how missed this arti­cle from the Stan­ford Dai­ly a few weeks ago : Chris­t­ian Groups Sue Uni­ver­si­ties Nation­wide.

some Chris­t­ian groups have been suc­cess­ful in forc­ing col­leges to allow them to bar gay stu­dents and athe­ists.

That’s an awful­ly loaded inter­est­ing way to describe what’s been hap­pen­ing. It makes it sound as though the Chris­t­ian groups are agi­tat­ing for rights pre­vi­ous­ly denied them instead of react­ing to new uni­ver­si­ty poli­cies which under­mine their beliefs. For a dif­fer­ent take, read Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s weblog (and this fol­low-up).

Junior Ros­abelle Ori­bel­lo, the LGBT [Les­bian, Gay, Bisex­u­al, Trans­gen­dered] Center’s liai­son to on-cam­pus res­i­dences, believes the cur­rent polit­i­cal atmos­phere at Stan­ford will help pre­vent the out­break of such a con­tro­ver­sy.

“I don’t think it will hap­pen at this cam­pus because the mes­sage the cen­ter has got­ten from the reli­gious groups has been that they are pret­ty affirm­ing of LGBTs,” she said. “Though I don’t know what it’s like on oth­er col­lege cam­pus­es, we have a pret­ty lib­er­al cam­pus and that goes far in reduc­ing the chances of these kinds of conflicts.”

While many reli­gious groups at Stan­ford clear­ly do affirm what­ev­er sex­u­al choic­es you make, many oth­ers do not. You would have no clue based on this arti­cle. That’s odd.

[Scot­ty] McLen­nan agreed with Oribello’s rea­son­ing.

“Stanford is a very plu­ral­is­tic envi­ron­ment, reli­gious and in oth­er ways,” he said.

Many stu­dents believe that it is this polit­i­cal­ly-homo­ge­neous atmos­phere that pre­vents the dif­fi­cul­ties faced at oth­er schools.

The con­trast between one sen­tence and the next is strik­ing: “plu­ral­is­tic envi­ron­ment” switched to “polit­i­cal­ly homo­ge­neous.” That it was­n’t caught by the reporter or the copy­ed­i­tor is revealing–the plu­ral­ism that Stan­ford pre­sup­pos­es is a super­fi­cial plu­ral­ism which focus­es on col­or, cul­ture, and sex­u­al con­duct but which usu­al­ly ignores con­vic­tions. In oth­er words, ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty is the one sort of diver­si­ty that is frowned upon.

On that note, I find it curi­ous that the author appar­ent­ly did­n’t seek to inter­view any­one who dis­agreed with his pre­sup­po­si­tions. Of the three reli­gious groups he did inter­view, none had been involved in the law­suits on oth­er cam­pus­es. That’s worth not­ing sim­ply because the arti­cle men­tions Inter­Var­si­ty at Tufts by name and there’s a very active Inter­Var­si­ty chap­ter here on the Farm. I won­der what they would have said had they been asked?

If you’re inter­est­ed in stuff like this, Andy Crouch has a great arti­cle called Cam­pus Col­li­sions that explains why Inter­Var­si­ty, in par­tic­u­lar, is more like­ly to get involved in law­suits than the rest of us.