Pride & Opinions

Gay activists charged with trespassing at Covenant College in Ga. - Boston Globe

“TRENTON, Ga. –Deputies charged four gay activists including a Connecticut woman with trespassing at Covenant College, a northwest Georgia private school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America. [...] Brad Voyles, dean of students at Covenant, said the Soulforce group had earlier refused a campus offer of meetings with student leaders, administrators and faculty in a designated room. Administrators refused to allow the group members to “roam campus and meet with anyone of their choosing,” according to a Feb. 8 statement on the college website.”

Now, I could start frothing at the mouth about certain parts of that article, such as the listing of homosexuality as a “sexual sin”. But I’m going to have to abstain (no pun intended) in favor of saying: what the heck, Soulforce? I know I’m probably swimming against the current here by not blindly supporting all activities of gay activists, but frankly I think that Covenant College’s campus administrators were perfectly justified in calling the police. Excuse me for not being so outrageously pink that my rose-colored glasses blind me to common sense.

This isn’t making a stand for gay rights. This is blatant, immature stupidity.

C’mon, guys, you’re making us look bad.

Let’s forget, for a moment, that we’re talking about gay activists here. Let’s say we’re just talking about a group of four random adults, whose intentions and backgrounds are only marginally known to the school’s administration. These adults want to wander unchecked among a host of students, speaking to them unsupervised, with or without faculty approval. It doesn’t matter what they intend to speak to them about; it doesn’t change the fact that their intentions and what they consider to be acceptable behavior are unknown. It also doesn’t change the fact that if they do something unacceptable, the school administration would be held responsible by the parents of the students.

I wouldn’t care if they were Girl Scout troop leaders bearing an armada of fiendishly addictive cookies; I wouldn’t let them on my campus unsupervised, either. Ever heard of CYA? When you’re responsible for a large body of students you worry about covering your bottoms and theirs before anything else, or you could risk far more than simply being labeled a bigot.

It should tell you something that even the students warned the representatives of Soulforce that they could be arrested for trespassing. This isn’t a matter of discriminating against Soulforce for advocating tolerance of homosexuality; if that were the case, then they wouldn’t have been invited to make their presentation to a select audience when they first declared their intention to visit Covenant. They’d have been told in no uncertain terms to keep off campus, period. This is a case of willfully ignoring warnings and trespassing on private property.

Soulforce had the opportunity to make their case to student leaders, faculty, and administrative staff, and passed on the chance to establish a basis for further relations to instead make a public display that basically amounted to “We’ll have it our way or no way at all”. Considering that administrators were willing to hear them out and give them a chance to get their foot in the door, actions like this don’t help the activist movement; they harm it by showing reckless disrespect for common courtesy and basic boundaries of authority that should be respected by all regardless of sexuality. Now that’s a door that they’ve slammed in their own faces.

I’m a strong advocate of both peaceful protest and (of course) ending discrimination against members of the GBLTQ community - the basic principles that Soulforce stands upon. But there are ways to institute peaceful protest and make your message heard without stepping on so many toes that your message is ignored in favor of criticism of your behavior and lack of respect.

Diplomacy, kids. It’s not just the Dictionary.com word of the day.

Better luck (and better sense) next time.

Then again, if they didn’t learn after the Baylor University incident…

gay activism, gay rights, hello stupid, soulforce