by Matt Barr

Not very Christian of you

Rather than the typically coherent, persuasive response to Stephanie Simon's piece in the L.A. Times called Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies you would normally expect here, let me make four only slightly connected observations.

1. The Georgia Institute of Technology has a speech code that forbids student speech that, as the article puts it, "puts down others because of their sexual orientation." Speech codes are fascist nonsense (that doesn't count as one point), but there it is. A student named Ruth Malhotra is suing to "force the university to be more tolerant of religious viewpoints," arguing that her Christianity "compels her to speak out against homosexuality."

(If you're new here, I'm Christian, wear a Mary medal and everything, and neither speak out against homosexuality nor can rouse myself to do much of anything else with regard to it; sexual orientation is none of anybody's business but the two [or however many] people to whom it's of immediate concern. Was against that stupid state constitutional amendment here in Ohio banning anything that sort of might look like gay marriage, even.)

It's a sad day in America when people try to argue for exceptions to rules about what you can and can't say (see also: The Online Freedom of Speech Act) instead of reminding people this is fricking America. (This still doesn't count as one point.) But it's even sadder when Christians run to court to try and get idiotic rules changed instead of, you know, breaking them and taking the consequences.

I suppose it's unreasonable to expect someone to get expelled before they fight back, and it's probably unreasonable to expect bloggers to get their blogs shut down under "campaign finance reform" laws before asserting their rights, too. But if I argue, and I do, that bloggers should disobey any law antithetical to the First Amendment rather than claiming not to be blogs but actually "online magazines of opinion" or whatever and begging Congress for their own law, then certainly Christians, who have two clauses of the First Amendment on their side, should do the same thing. Christians have a long and commendable history of doing what they think is right and getting smacked around for it rather than trying to make sure getting smacked around doesn't hurt so much first.

Easy for me to say, I know.

2. Would it kill a reporter to note that adherents of not every religion go to court and sue when they think they've been wronged; some kill people and burn down buildings? Sure, that would probably run afoul of the speech code at the Georgia Institute of Technology, but the L.A. Times isn't constrained by that, only by the size of its own balls.

3. I wish "secularists" or whatever they're calling themselves would pick a lane. When Ken Blackwell owns stick in Barr Pharmaceuticals, makers of Plan B, they cluck about "moral consistency." When however Catholic Charities won't place adoptive children in same-sex households, they try to muscle them into acting morally inconstently. In order, I suppose, that they'll be able to cluck about how Catholics don't believe in same sex adoption, but look! Catholic Charities places children in same sex households! Those morally inconsistent theocrats!

Which only has tangential relevance to a hit piece about "religious liberty [being] used to justify all manner of harassment," just extrapolating. Ruth Malhotra agrees not to speak out against homosexuality and some Stephanie Simon somewhere will write a blog post about her moral inconsistency. Make up your mind. Do you want them to act they way they say they believe they should act, or do you want them to act another way? (Use Google Maps to find the shortest route around that sentence.)

4. This isn't important enough to tell us earlier than paragraph 31? Organizers of Coming Out Week 2004 at GIT forwarded a letter they'd received from an organization Malhotra chairs to college administrators because it was "rude, unfair and presumptuous." This is one of the things that got her reprimanded under the school's speech code. Simon describes the letter:

The letter referred to the campus gay rights group Pride Alliance as a "sex club ... that can't even manage to be tasteful." It went on to say that it was "ludicrous" for Georgia Tech to help fund the Pride Alliance.

The letter berated students who come out publicly as gay, saying they subject others on campus to "a constant barrage of homosexuality."

"If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off the political propaganda," the letter said.

Possibly unfair and presumptuous, probably rude, but honestly, how is an environment where you're encouraged to tell the grownups when someone's being mean to you preparing anyone for the real world? You go through this whole breathless article expecting that Malhotra is running around wild eyed loudly condemning gay people as hellbound heathens. She was rude? And she got reprimanded? Seriously?

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