5/18/00 6:15 p.m.
Tufts to be a Christian on Campus
Colleges today say yes to porn and no to God — but not without a fight.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor------------lopezk@nationalreview.com

n the wake of lots of media coverage, Tufts University's Committee on Student Life voted earlier this week during a special post-semester session to reinstate Tufts Christian Fellowship as a recognized student group, after it had been banished from campus only weeks before. The committed students, their chaplain, and an assortment of conservative defenders can be credited with the win this week. It proves that these are not always quixotic battles conservatives wage on our nation's campuses. But it reminds us of the urgency of not forgetting our college students. Regrettably, come September, many freshmen will enter into a world worse, in many cases, than most parents imagine it.

At Tufts, students were banned from using school property to meet and read the Bible because they refused to allow an openly gay student, who insists that the Bible has no qualms about homosexual activity, to serve on their leadership council. Despite her dissent on a fundamental belief, TCF — Christians not in name only — they still invited her to remain a member (as they still do). Why exactly did she need to penetrate one of the few outlets of traditional morality at the school? And why couldn't she join the other Protestant Christian fellowship group on campus, which offered her leadership opportunities?

These questions were irrelevant. The school persisted. As Cornell Law School's David French, the lawyer who stepped up to represent TCF, notes, "the University was telling Tufts Christian Fellowship that an individual's religious beliefs (the belief that homosexual practice was not contrary to scriptural mandates) could not be considered when judging that person's fitness to lead a religious group."

With the help of pro bono counsel, the kids at Tufts are free to pray, but students at other schools aren't so lucky. The Christian Fellowship at Vermont's Middlebury College, in session until May 21, awaits two decisions about the group's fate. Funds were frozen by the school earlier this spring, after a student who was denied a leadership position last year (for the same reasons as the girl at Tufts) decided to out himself and the group to the campus, claiming MCF violated the school's anti-discrimination policy.

A financial panel found that, much to its dismay, there was nothing on record that could justify the continued freezing of funds. But the group — on a campus not known for being a bastion of traditional morality — awaits a decision on whether the group should be punished for denying a gay student a leadership role; also, whether new handbook rules are adopted by the school that would forbid the group to discriminate on the basis of religion and prohibit students who openly disagree with their mission to be on an election ballot.

And it doesn't stop there — Christian associations with traditional views are unwelcome at Whitman College in Washington State, Grinnell in Iowa, and Ball State University in Indiana, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And this "increasing tendency to use coercion to eradicate dissent" on campuses, as Tufts Christian Leadership's chaplain Curtis Chang describes it, doesn't raise the eyebrows of the likes of the ACLU. But that comes as no surprise, as lefty Harvard professor (but free-speecher to the max) Alan Dershowitz has said on other issues, when it comes to most so-called civil-liberties groups and their commitment to free speech, it's often "Free speech for me and not for thee." Only liberals may apply.

Last week, students at the State University of New York at Binghamton voted to force the on-campus video store to stock pornography. So, colleges endorse porn but reject God--and the First Amendment. Give us a break.