What do you know, it's hard being gay in Christian colleges
Quote:A Gay Man Says He Was Tormented at Liberty University. Now He's Suing
I still vividly remember my meetings with Dane Emerick, Liberty’s former in-house conversion “therapist” and the pastor I met with over the span of my undergraduate studies. At Emerick’s behest, I was consistently expected to offer a detailed stock of my teenage sexual history and activity. He told me that despite being attracted to men, I was not actually gay but, rather, a heterosexual “struggling with same-sex attraction.”
He claimed that living the “gay lifestyle” (whatever that is) would lead to years of unhappiness and ultimately to hell. And as a college freshman at the age of 18, I thoroughly believed him.
Now, over a decade later, I am one of 33 plaintiffs suing the U.S. Department of Education. Brought by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, the lawsuit centers on the question of whether or not religious colleges and universities (mostly of the evangelical or Mormon varieties) should receive federal funds while actively discriminating against their LGBTQ+ students.
I chose to attend Liberty because, as a kid who was a part of a faith tradition that hated queer people, I earnestly thought I could become straight, and I knew that Liberty had a program for it. For years, Liberty has offered one-on-one conversion “therapy,” a bogus pseudo-scientific attempt to change individuals’ sexual orientations and/or gender identities/expressions. The school has also offered a group version of this “treatment.”
These programs tried to convince me that I desperately wanted to be straight. They were of course wrong, and they should never have been offered in the first place.
This is yet another reason why I’m part of this lawsuit: To stand with the countless LGBTQ+ students whose lived experiences expose the wrongdoings of Liberty and of similar institutions. To stand with my friend Eli Germanotta (they/them) who also went to Liberty. One night while walking back to their dorm, the word FAGGOT was spray-painted on their back by a group of male Liberty students.
https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2021...-hes-suing
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"