Activists are seeking to purge evangelist and pastor Greg Laurie of California from leading the National Day of Prayer event May 2 in Washington, D.C.  His offense?  Laurie has preached that the Bible defines marriage as one man and one woman, and that homosexual conduct is outside God’s design.

The National Day of Prayer was created by Congress and signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1952.  Its purpose is “to mobilize prayer in America and to encourage personal repentance and righteousness in the culture.”  The United States has a long tradition of presidents calling for days of prayer for the nation, and Congress formalized this practice to happen annually on the first Thursday in May. Mrs. Shirley Dobson is the chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force.

This year, the National Day of Prayer Task Force selected Greg Laurie as its 2013 Honorary Chairman.  Laurie is senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California.  Pastor Laurie has also lead many evangelistic rallies, called Harvest Crusades, where thousands of people hear him preach the Gospel of Christ at large stadiums.

But activists have ignored all of the good Laurie has done in his life and focused only on what they disagree with:  his preaching of the Bible’s views on marriage.  The activists are seeking to impose a theological litmus test on anyone who prays at public events.  Agree with our views, or we hound you to the outskirts of society.  So much for their alleged commitment to diversity and tolerance.

A similar uproar occurred earlier this year, when activists successfully banished Pastor Louie Giglio of Passion City Church in Atlanta from praying at President Obama’s Second Inauguration due to a sermon he had preached 15 years earlier on marriage and the Bible’s prohibitions on homosexual conduct.  Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California also endured similar criticism when he was selected to pray at President Obama’s First Inauguration in 2009, but the President allowed him to pray, in spite of his views on marriage.

Pastor Laurie is standing resolute, and is expecting to pray at the National Day of Prayer gathering in Washington, D.C. on May 2.  And I am sure Laurie will be praying for God’s blessings on his opponents.

Controversy continues to swirl around an anti-Israel “BDS” event at Brooklyn College on February 7, in which police removed four Jewish students from the event advocating for “BDS,” which is “boycott [of], divestment [from] and sanctions [against])” Israel. School officials are now investigating the removal, according to an article in the Jewish Daily Forward.

Earlier, Travis Barham reported on the academic freedom aspects of this event.  Brooklyn College elevated the controversy when the school’s political science department agreed to co-sponsor the event.  Some argued that the college should have not taken sides in such a controversial debate, because official sponsorship by the school gave greater legitimacy to the anti-Israeli views, according to an article in the New York Times. Others said the public pressure raised questions about academic freedom of the school’s political science department.

BDS advocates make the controversial comparison of current day Israel and its treatment of its Palestinian residents to the apartheid regime that ruled South Africa and how it treated its black citizens.  They urge universities to “boycott, divest and sanction” Israel today as they did South Africa in the 1970′s and 80′s.  Many supporters of Israel strongly dispute that comparison to South African apartheid, by pointing out that Israel has the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, and treats its residents much better than many of the nearby Arab neighbors treat their citizens.

The event sparked another First Amendment controversy when campus security removed four Jewish students from the event.  It is not clear why campus security ordered the four students to leave. Some report that the Jewish students were not disruptive so that cannot be the reason why the security people removed them.   Campus officials are conducting an investigation of this event.

If the investigation finds that someone ordered campus security to escort the Jewish students out of the meeting because they disagreed with the anti-Israel views of the BDS movement, this incident raises serious concerns about an open marketplace of ideas on that campus, and whether the school protects the First Amendment rights of its students.

Major changes may radically transform how people get higher education, and that may have significant changes on the unconstitutional policies many state universities impose to regulate and suppress unpopular student speech on campus. One author, Nathan Harden, recently predicted  what these possible changes would look like:

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

   Harden predicts these factors will drive the changes – huge, unsustainable student debt, the rise of MOOCs (massive open online courses), as well as a growing sense that many of the majors for bachelor’s degrees do not help students significantly in finding work.  Right now, individual student debt is at an all time high, Harden said, at $23,000. For students completing graduate schools, like law school, the debt load can be far higher.  This means that more and more students are questioning the wisdom and value of going deeply into debt in order to earn a bachelor’s degree that does not substantial increase one’s opportunity to get a job. Universities are confronting price resistance, making them think twice about raising tuition because students are less likely to borrow money to pay the increased costs.

Also, more and more universities are putting their courses online, for free.  Universities are finding that some of the courses are very popular.  Students could take Harvard courses without ever stepping on campus at Cambridge.  But could students earn degrees this way, with no direct personal interaction with their professors? Is this the future of the university? We will see the answers to these questions worked out in the near future.

What this points to is that market forces, that is, the growing reluctance of students to pay increasing costs, will force change at universities, or many will not survive. Students could possibly use this market clout to pressure universities to abandon their unconstitutional speech codes, speech zones, mandatory student fees, etc.  Those are the fruit of liberal ideologues controlling higher education. They have been able to assume for years that students would submit to the restrictions on their freedoms without question, and dutifully continue to pay the increased costs.  That willingness by students is beginning to vanish as they ask why they should go into debt to be subjected to such unconstitutional policies. Students need to flex their financial muscles.  At least some universities will modify or abandon these policies if it is the difference between continuing the university, or laying off professors, or even closing their doors.

It was inevitable that Americans would accept legalized abortion imposed by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. That’s what I constantly heard during my three years at the University of Minnesota Law School in the late 1970′s.  The few pro-life law students and I felt great apprehension to raise our hands in class and express even a hint of doubt about the constitutional reasoning of Roe v. Wade, or question whether the decision was morally good.  Abortion supporters stood vigilant and pounced on any ”anti-women” dissent challenging the supposedly great and enlightened advance wrought by Roe v. Wade.   We were told that pro-lifers were on the wrong side of history.  Public acceptance of abortion was inevitable, inexorable, we heard at law school in the 1970′s,  as they say today about redefining marriage.  Give up.  Resistance is futile. Opposition to abortion, they confidently predicted back then, would soon die out because, it is obvious that young people, and everyone else, would grow increasingly pro-abortion.

Except, that’s not what has happened.  They have been woefully (Roefully?) wrong.  The pro-abortion culture today is crumbling and teetering, not solidifying.  Tens of  thousands march for life each January in Washington D.C.  Polls show young people, raised from day one under the reign of Roe v. Wade, are increasingly pro-life on abortion. Students for Life of America has over 2000 college students coming to its annual conventions, and they turn away young people each year because they need a bigger place to meet.  Prolife initiatives at state legislatures have the momentum as they introduce new laws restricting abortion.  Business owners are willing to go to court to protect their rights not to fund abortions under Obamacare.   Those who support abortion now defend it, no longer as a moral triumph advancing women and human progress generally as they did in the 1970′s, but as a necessary evil.

So how did that change happen?  From the beginning, persistent pro-life Catholics spoke against the moral evil of abortion, even in the face of opposition and politicians defecting to the abortion side.   These early pro-life leaders convinced evangelical leaders like Francis Schaeffer, Dr. C. Everett Koop, James Dobson and others to teach Protestants about the truth about abortion.  In the 1980′s and 90′s, the ultra sound machines allowed us to see the unborn children in the wombs, and no one could honestly deny their humanity.  And other leaders with a broad vision, like Pope John Paul II, worked to build a culture of life, changing peoples’ attitudes about abortion.  And that change is happening.

I see it when I visit law school campuses to speak. I am free to say, “Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and its shoddy reasoning is embarrassing,’ with hardly anyone speaking against me.  Law students today can now openly question the morality of abortion without being shouted down as a bigot.  I could not have done that in a law school 30 years ago.  The courageous advocacy by the early pro-lifers has paid off, and people are changing their minds on abortion.  And when culture changes, altering the law is not too far behind. So, do not lose heart.   Like running water flowing over stones in a stream bed, perseverance for moral truth triumphs over “inevitable” destructive moral wrongs.

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Watch the 2013 SFLA National Pro-life Conference LIVE online on Saturday, 1/26/2013 at www.SFLAlive.org

The 2013 Students for Life of America National Conference is a one-day event that provides education, training, and opportunities to network with fellow students and national pro-life leaders who know how vital campuses are to the pro-life movement.

Leftist bloggers successfully convinced officials for President Obama’s Inauguration to pressure Pastor Louie Giglio of Passion City Church in Atlanta to withdraw from praying the benediction at the ceremony January 21.  The Inaugural Committee had selected Giglio to pray two days ago because of his impressive work battling human trafficking and slavery around the world, and his amazing leadership of the Christ-honoring Passion conferences.  Just last week, Giglio spoke to 60,000 students in the Georgia Dome for the Passion 2013 conference.

The leftist ideologues cared nothing for that and scoured the Internet until they found a recording of an old sermon Giglio recorded in the mid-1990s, in which he taught that the Bible defines marriage only as one man and one woman, and therefore, homosexual behavior is sinful.  Even though Giglio has rarely preached on this subject and focused on helping the needy in the world, the lefties went bonkers, and demanded his ouster from the inaugural platform.  Louie Giglio gracious acquiesed to the officials’ pressure and stepped down.  His statement explains what his current work has focused on, and carefully avoids repudiating the Biblical view on marriage.  Louie Giglio is seeing the bulk of his life’s work ignored and the totality of his decades-long ministry distorted by those who summarize it by one sermon he preached 15-20 years ago.  This is a tragic slander, because Giglio’s Passion City Church is no Westboro Baptist.

Christian college students encounter the same ideological pressures on most campuses.  It does not matter whether you devote your time to fight sex trafficking, build shelters for the homeless, or help eradicate disease in Third World nations, if you also hold to the wrong view on marriage and homosexual conduct.  But then, is not the reason sex trafficking is wrong is because it violates God’s design for marriage and treats shamefully those, male and female,  made in the image of God?  The Bible’s doctrine on marriage has many applications.

We must recall Christ’s words that there is an irreducible offense of the Gospel, even among advocates of tolerance and diversity on college campuses.  Sometimes, Christians say and do things that invite understandable scorn or criticism from others, but not always.  Many times, people who simply oppose the Gospel will irrrationally hate those who believe it.  Louie Giglio and every college student derided for believing in Christ can be encouraged by His words (Matthew 5:11-12): “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

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Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building legal ministry that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.
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Additional commentary on the Louie Giglio situation:
Albert Mohler
Russell Moore
Joe Carter