Feast of Eden
… and instead finds “thoughtful and incisive” speakers. Via the Columbia Spectator:
Earlier in the week, I had received an invitation to take part in a pro-LGBT rights rally on campus and had considered going, unaware that the event being protested was the conference that I was planning on attending. As I approached Lerner, I was slightly confused about the intent of the picketers—I hadn’t been under the impression that this was an anti-gay conference.
The lectures were thoughtful and incisive—so much so that I quickly discarded my original plan of staying for a few sessions before returning to work. The speakers, to a T, were academics who based their arguments and presentations on facts and reason, not on bigotry or prejudice. Only one speaker, author Dawn Eden, made an argument based on religious grounds, and her lecture, “Everything is Tolerated and Nothing is Forgiven,” was about chastity and dealing with the excesses of permissiveness, not about the LGBT community. Only three speakers broached the issue of same-sex relationships, and only two of those three explicitly passed judgment on these relationships.
Even then, the arguments were made on strictly rational grounds. Lynn Wardle outlined the case for traditional marriage on the notion that the family was the original, fundamental building block of society as envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Disagree as I may, this was not the rambling of a bigot. This was a reasoned, principled argument based on a fundamental respect for the LGBT community coupled with a specific interpretation of American history. [Read the full article by Kyle Dontoh: “Prejudgment Skewers Debate.”]
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