It's been a month since the SA Senate determined that the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship was violating university and SA rules by requiring its leadership to sign a "basis of faith."
This piece of IVCF's constitution forced those elected to sign a document that affirms the entire "trustworthiness and authority of" the Bible.
Just in case you've missed the entire "gay marriage" debate that's been raging the past few years, there's a line in the Bible that reads "thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination." Apparently, gay Christians don't exactly agree with that line.
You can't really blame them for cherry picking the Bible, really. They all do it. Let's take some other quotes from Leviticus, and see how many Christians follow them to the letter.
Leviticus 21:16-23 plainly states that the handicapped should not participate in religious ceremonies, including the blind, the lame, and dwarves. 21:9 tells believers to burn the daughters of priests if they have been unchaste.
Passage 25:44-46 outlines rules for buying slaves. In fact, many biblical arguments were made leading up to the Civil War defending the institution of slavery, but nobody would blame Christians for ignoring those passages. Such passages are from a different time.
For a moment, however, we will ignore the inherent hypocrisy in still choosing to discriminate against gay people based on an ancient text that has innumerable hateful messages.
The "basis of faith" blatantly clashes with SA guidelines that don't allow clubs to discriminate based on sex, race, or religion. The IVCF might argue that a Christian can't become the leader of the Muslim SA, but the truth is that he or she can.
So why is the SA Senate waiting to make a decision? The story broke all the way back in early December. The SA Senate said it knew that there was a violation back then, and the IVCF has made it perfectly clear that it refuses to remove the basis of faith.
That's fine, the IVCF doesn't have to change anything in its constitution, but don't expect the students of this school to pay for your club. Then you can ostracize gay people from your community all you want, the same people you insist on denigrating are no longer footing the bill.
Either way you look at it, continuing to delay the decision is unfair to all parties involved.
For the IVCF, it now has to wait another month to see if the money that it believes is due to it can be used. Steven Jackson, the person central to this whole issue, has to wait to be vindicated after being pressured to resign.
In its letter to us, the IVCF made the appeal that in keeping with its constitution it is protecting diversity on campus by ensuring its leadership holds to the values of the group. The IVCF wants to think that it's entitled to the money because of religious liberty, which our country was founded on.
Yet religious liberty is not in question here. Nobody is arguing that the IVCF doesn't have the right to be a religious group that discriminates; you can do that in America. Just don't think that we have to pay for it.
