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Black Student: ‘Segregation Now!’

Also: Baylor manufacturing rationale to abandon Evangelical teaching on LGBT
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The other day, the University of Virginia opened its Multicultural Student Center. Its goals, according to the center’s website:

Here’s some holistic empowerment and understanding-building-through-dialogue for you, shot within the Center:

If you can’t watch the clip, the woman says this is a “public service announcement,” then:

“If y’all didn’t know, this is the MSC, and, frankly, there’s just too many white people in here, and this is a space for people of color, so, just be really cognizant of the space that you’re taking up because it does make some of us POCs uncomfortable when we see too many white people in here.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think universities routinely send the exact message this black woman had the bad manners to speak aloud.

As we all know, if a white student stood and ordered non-white students to vacate a space because their non-whiteness made it uncomfortable for white people, the entire campus would have had a gran mal seizure (and if it were Yale, the students and allied faculty would have shaken down the university for $50 million, as happened in 2015 over the Halloween costume debacle). But this will pass without notice, because racism is a virtue when it is expressed or deployed against white people. Dr. Martin Luther King’s universalist ethic is sooo twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Baylor University’s administration is busy constructing a rationale to abandon the school’s Evangelical moral teaching on LGBT. It sent out an electronic survey to its faculty today. I’ve received the same screenshots from two readers who teach there. One said, “Literally the only thing they care about is LGBT.” Here are a couple of the questions:

Last year, at the start of the fall semester. Baylor president Linda Livingstone announced that the Texas Baptist university’s Board of Regents had reaffirmed its traditional teaching on sexuality:

 “The University affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God. Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm.”

… but, according to President Livingstone, there would be changes:

With this said, we understand that we must do more to demonstrate love and support for our students who identify as LGBTQ.

A common theme emerging from all of the aforementioned conversations is the need for us to provide more robust and more specific training for students, faculty and staff in loving, caring for and supporting our LGBTQ students.

It also became clear that we need to provide additional opportunities for our University community to listen to each other and discuss such matters in a civil, academic and supportive environment, as they are important to our faith and society.

And, perhaps most importantly, we need to establish trust with our LGBTQ students so that, among other things, they might seek out the resources provided by Baylor – all of which must be done as a faithful expression of our Christian mission.

Nobody can object to wanting to love these students, and to treat them with genuine compassion and fairness. But this is how these things go: the administration leads with “love” and “listening” as part of “Christian mission.” Now it has moved into creating a foundation in data for loving and listening the university away from its problematic insistence on Scriptural authority. I predict that when this survey is complete, the Livingstone administration will profess surprise at the size of the LGBT contingent on faculty, and will say that it is urgent that the university change its policies to increase faculty satisfaction, as part of its Christian mission. The phrase “Baylor family” will be deployed generously. And that is how the college will change, and come to look just like everybody else. We have seen this happen so often within Christian institutions.

Linda Livingstone can’t very well stand there with the boldness of that black undergraduate woman at UVA, and say that there are just too many conservative Evangelical people at Baylor, and that they’re making LGBTs and their allies uncomfortable, as well as embarrassing the university in front of academia. But that’s what’s coming, veiled by data-based bureaucratic claims, “diversity and inclusion” jibber-jabber, and therapeutic Christian jargon.

 

 

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