Column: Challenging Gordon university’s ‘deeply rooted’ attitudes

Being a proud graduate of Gordon university, i’ve found the last 8 weeks of debate over Gordon College’s discrimination discouraging that is anti-LGBT.

But absolutely absolutely absolutely nothing has frustrated me as much as President D. Michael Lindsay’s Monday op-ed in this paper (“There are wounds which will should be healed,” Aug. 25).

Nearly couple of years ago, we and many other LGBT alumni founded OneGordon, an LGBT advocacy organization serving users of the Gordon community (we’re maybe not associated with the school, needless to say). Many of us knew, from direct experience, just just how profoundly rooted Gordon’s anti-gay attitudes went, and just how very long the street to acceptance could be. It’s real that present occasions have illuminated a fire under us, our supporters, therefore the world that is outside but I’ve stayed mentally prepared for the discussion because of the university of these dilemmas become long and challenging.

The thing I didn’t expect, nonetheless, ended up being for the university leadership which will make statements that appear to bear therefore relationship that is little truth.

Dr. Lindsay’s aim in signing the famous page, asking President Obama for an exemption from LGBT work nondiscrimination guidelines, ended up being simple and easy — it absolutely was to exempt Gordon from those guidelines. You don’t have actually to just take my word he published, “Signing the page was at maintaining with your decades-old conviction that, being an clearly Christian organization, Gordon should set the conduct objectives for people in our community. for this: In a letter posted regarding the university web site on July 7 (“Questions in connection with Letter to President Obama”),”

If you’re unconvinced, read another page provided for alumni by the president associated with Board of Trustees (the ultimate authority at Gordon) on July 13; it is connected through the very first post from the OneGordon site. Like all of us on the Board of Trustees, is concerned about Gordon’s ability to hire for mission in it, he explains Dr. Lindsay’s signature as follows: “ he. For this reason he finalized the letter, plus in that people support him 100 per cent.”

Both the president and also the trustees of Gordon College, then, want the capacity to fire a feminine worker for, state, marrying an other woman.

The good news is Dr. Lindsay is apparently changing their story — possibly as the above place is costing Gordon its partnerships with local governments and organizations (such as for example Salem while the Peabody Essex Museum). In the current op-ed, he suggests he didn’t have Gordon in your mind at all, but alternatively other companies like Catholic Charities while the Salvation Army. However it is hard to get together again this along with his plus the chairman’s previous statements.

Similarly difficult to think is his claim that is repeated that university will not take part in discrimination. However it does. You don’t have to just just simply take my term it’s on the college website for anyone to see (the top Google result for “gordon college behavioral standards”) for it:. Underneath the words “Who We Are,” you will discover “homosexual practice” lumped in with theft and drunkenness as items that “will not be tolerated within the life of Gordon community people, either on or off campus.” It is hard to reconcile this longstanding policy with benaughty their declare that intolerance “has no spot at Gordon university.” Maybe, this is the reason he generally seems to studiously avoid mentioning it.

The conventional response is that Gordon isn’t against homosexual orientations, just homosexual behavior. That is like saying you’ve got no issue with ducks, just pets that quack. Singling out LGBT pupils and workers for unique limitations to their behavior is discriminatory, complete end, just as that Bob Jones University’s ban on interracial relationship (a behavior) had been racist. Plus it supports a wider campus tradition of homophobia that Gordon pupils I speak to suffer with even today.

The Gordon university that we know and love, and that built this kind of reputation that is previously good the North Shore, wouldn’t normally run from these uncomfortable conversations. It can take part in truthful, candid discussion internally along with the wider community in regards to the real dilemmas on the line. There clearly was a profound discussion to be had about faith, pluralism, the Bible and sexuality in modern-day America, and Gordon College must certanly be in the middle of it. The teachers i understand might be scared of losing their jobs lately — but they may not be afraid of any intellectual or debate that is moral the sun’s rays, nor do they come into these with their minds already constructed.

That’s the Gordon that individuals are typical prone to losing. an organization which has had taught intellectual humility, integrity and courage to 1000s of individuals over the past 125 years now seems dissembling and unserious, wanting to sweep a debate of historic magnitude beneath the rug just as if it had been merely a misunderstanding that is little.

I actually do perhaps not envy President Lindsay’s place. The college’s trustees, faculty, staff, pupils, alumni, next-door next-door neighbors and community partners are pulling in various instructions, and there’s absolutely no way to completely satisfy everybody else. I would like to think that their motives are great, even yet in the facial skin of troubling incongruencies in the additionally the Trustees’ public statements, and exactly what often may seem like an unwillingness that is total either to see LGBT Gordonites as full people in the city.

For the reason that character, that he is a wicked man who needs to repent (though that might also be true) if I could impart one sentiment into the mind of President Lindsay, it would not be. It might be this: it really is okay never to understand the solution. It really is okay to be incorrect. Simply talk the facts in love as most readily useful as you are able to, plus the truth will set you free. That’s the variety of leader this community requires.