Marco Rubio recently said this: “If you think about it, we are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech. Because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.”
Leftist publications were quick to denounce his statement. “Marco Rubio makes a clown of himself” blared Salon. The Daily Beast chimed in with “Marco Rubio pathetically plays the LGBT victim.”
Of course the left would claim Rubio’s comments are ridiculous. They’re playing a game of smoke and mirrors, distracting Americans from the fact that the very thing Rubio claims is happening is indeed happening, mostly on college campuses.
On Tuesday at UC Santa Barbara, for example, a crowd of students disrupted a talk on campus in support of traditional marriage with a rowdy protest that included loud chanting and crassly worded signs such as “anal is the most inclusive form of f*cking,” “there is a future in sodomy” and “God loves fags.”
When the featured speaker – Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, a former Ivy League professor and founder and president of the pro-traditional marriage nonprofit Ruth Institute – left the stage and attempted to engage the protestors in conversation, they continued shouting in her face before they angrily filed out of the lecture hall, allowing the talk to finally proceed. The College Fix has video of the protest.
This is one example among many.
In 2013, when a Boston University professor was accused of uttering a politically incorrect sentence against gay marriage in the privacy of her office, she was dragged into a campus bias investigation for possibly uttering words that offended a “protected class.”
Last spring, when a group of students tried to get the venerable Catholic University of Notre Dame to take a stand in support of traditional marriage, they were met with steep opposition by students and campus officials and accused of wanting to “degrade the lives of those who identify as GLBTQ.”
Last fall, there was the student who was told he could not even openly disagree with gay marriage in class – at a Jesuit college – and that his comments were “homophobic.”
But perhaps one of the best examples is from Stanford University, where support of traditional marriage in 2014 was literally deemed “hate speech.”