Lovers in a dangerous time

February 6, 2004 By

Dallas Voice weighs in with a report about Matthew Bass, who says he was forced out of Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary after administrators asked if he was gay.

The most striking detail: Bass told the administrators that whether he was gay was none of their business.

Nevertheless, Bass made clear to Dallas Voice — The Community Newspaper for Gay & Lesbian Dallas — that he is indeed gay, and has felt God’s increased blessings on his life since coming out.

Let’s follow this, then: Bass has been out of the closet since early 2003, but the administrators of Baylor have no business asking him to confirm what he has announced to tout le monde?

The former seminarian’s description of the Baylor campus reveals similar paradoxes. “Sexuality cannot be discussed openly at Baylor,” the report says authoritatively (a search of the university’s website says otherwise), but that hasn’t stopped Bass from discerning that “600-700 Baylor students, at minimum, are gay.”

That’s quite a plethora of covert discussions about sexuality!

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  • http://clientandserver.com dw

    Any religious blog that quotes Bruce Cockburn is a good thing. :)

    I’ve known a number of Baylor alums and washouts… it’s a very rebellious place, and the fundie takeover of the SBC has only increased the repression. Mr. Bass, though, sounds like he’s become a little unglued. 700 gay students among 14,000 total enrollment sounds really high — isn’t the generally agreed to number now around 3%? 5% in a mainline seminary, perhaps, but 5% in a conservative Christian university in Centex?

    And how’d he find this out? Did he have 700 enroll in “Modern Hermenutics in the Music of RuPaul?”

  • Jaime R. Vidal

    If I lived in the days of the Roman Empire, I might have told tout le monde I was a Christian, but, if a Roman Judge asked me if I was a Christian, I might well have answered that it was none of his business. I know that answering “Christianus sum” might have got me the crown of martyrdom, but, like Thomas More, I think there’s nothing wrong with trying to keep your integrity while avoiding martyrdom.

    So I would say, a gay person who is pretty much out has every right to tell seminary authorities who ask him about it that it is none of their business — or, as priests used to say to judges in Elizabethan England, “That’s for you to prove.”

    My real question would be, why would an out gay man want to be in a seminary which would expel him for being gay? Why would he want to be ordained in a church that would refuse him ordination if they knew this fact, which I assume is most important for his own identity? My reply, were I in Mr. Bass’ place, would be, “If you don’t want me as I am, that’s your loss, and the Church’s loss.” Or, as Saint Joan says to her clerical judges in Shaw’s play, “I am God’s child, and you are not fit that I should live among you.”

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