“Sports Illustrated reports on Freedom From Religion Foundation’s complaints about Clemson football”
It may shock some to learn that I find myself sympathetic in this case to the position of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. What is plainly appropriate and good for a place like Brigham Young University or Baylor University or the University of Notre Dame seems quite obviously inappropriate for a place like Clemson, which is a public school.
***
Again, private colleges and universities are generally and rightly free to enforce whatever policies they wish to enforce. In this particular case, the school in question is Duke University, from which one of my nieces received a bachelor’s degree in engineering. (We attended her graduation.) It was once a fairly conservative Methodist school. Nowadays, it . . . well, it isn’t. In fact, practices consistent with conservative Methodism (and with roughly 2000 years of Christian tradition) may well get an individual or a group into trouble with Duke’s powers-that-be:
“Religion News Service story on Young Life avoids crucial, complex doctrine questions at Duke”
***
My principal concern in such stories as these tends to be freedom. Simply that. I don’t believe, speaking very broadly, that state institutions should favor or disfavor particular positions on theology or religious practice. Thus, cake decorators shouldn’t be forced by the state to create designs endorsing gay marriage, or Nazism, or Latter-day Saint missions. Nor should students at a public university be subjected to pro- or anti-religious messages from official sources at that university.
Freedom is the crucial concept in the case discussed below, as well. Not my supposed “homophobia” or my alleged “hate” for gay people. (I hold none.) No, the point at issue is freedom. It’s about liberty.
Here are two articles about a case recently decided by the Arizona Supreme Court. The first deals with the case itself:
“The Arizona Supreme Court Strikes a Powerful Blow for Free Speech and Religious Freedom”
The second deals with the strange and quite unbalanced media response to the case:
“Arizona media sizzle over whether calligraphers can decline to create gay wedding invites”
***
I was happy to read this:
I was not so happy to read this:
A note, by the way, about the author most commonly cited above:
“David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a contributor to Time. David is a New York Times bestselling author, and his next book, The Great American Divorce, will be published by St. Martin’s Press later this year. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and a former lecturer at Cornell Law School. He has served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom. David is a former major in the United States Army Reserve. In 2007, he deployed to Iraq, serving in Diyala Province as Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. He lives and works in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife, Nancy, and his three children.”
Posted from Park City, Utah
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In