Since Pastor Giglio withdrew from the upcoming presidential inauguration due to leftist outrage over a sermon about homosexual conduct, a variety of voices have rallied to his defense.  These voices include fellow ministers like Albert Mohler, constitutional attorneys like Jordan Lorence, and others like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council.  But recently, two younger voices—and former Alliance Defending Freedom clients—highlighted how those who advocate for tolerance the most display it the least. 

After recounting Pastor Giglio’s wide-ranging ministry, Ruth Malhotra and Jennifer Keeton describe just how “tolerantly” leftists treats those who disagree with them:

The extreme opposition to Giglio was yet another example of a tragic lesson we learned firsthand as students at public universities.  And that lesson is this:  unless you embrace, applaud, and advocate for the homosexual lifestyle and same-sex marriage, your views, your voice, and even your work on behalf of the poor and suffering are not welcome in the public square.

Despite all the sacrificial efforts one may have invested into humanitarian causes for the greater good, there is this rabid insistence that in order to do anything in the civic arena—including offer a prayer at a monumental event for our nation—you must not have, at any time in your history, spoken in a way that is disagreeable to a certain group of activists.

As they explain, this extreme intolerance of those who hold Biblical views extends from high-profile events like an inaugural benediction to university campuses, where it is pervasive.  And it involves a range of tactics:  “Sometimes—as in the case of Giglio—the tactic of the far-left involves attempts to shame and shun those they disagree with, and other times they actually use the force of law to silence those who do not share their worldview.”

For Ruth and Jennifer, this effort to purge the public square of any viewpoints the left deems “offensive” or “intolerant” is far from theoretical.  Instead, they speak from personal experience, as they have both stood courageously to defend their convictions and freedoms at Georgia Tech and Augusta State University:

We were repeatedly censored, threatened, and condemned for our refusal to conform to a narrow agenda regarding human sexual behavior.  We were told by administrators and professors that we must change our Biblical beliefs, follow impossibly vague speech codes, and undergo comprehensive programs of thought reform.  Our cases, filed by Alliance Defending Freedom, defended the freedom of Christian and conservative students to speak on matters of public importance and to pursue our fields of study without compromising our convictions.  In response to our lawsuits, the Tolerance Inquisition unleashed its fury.  We faced everything from snide insults to false attacks on our character to threats of rape and murder so serious that Ruth was put under police protection.

Sadly, Pastor Giglio’s experience illustrates how the mindset so typical on university campuses is beginning to leech into the rest of society.  The only way for this to change is for Christians—whether on campus or off—to ignore the social stigma and stand up for their beliefs.  When they do, we stand ready to assist them and to insist that their freedom to exercise and proclaim those beliefs be respected.

Update:  Ruth’s and Jennifer’s column is also available at The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Christian Post.

History is happening this week in Atlanta that will change the world.  This week, 60,000 young people are assembling at the Georgia Dome in downtown Atlanta for the Passion 2013 conference, led by Louie Giglio. One of my daughters is there, along with other young people from my church in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as young people from all over the U.S. and many nations.

The Passion conferences started in 1997, and this is the largest one to date.  I have heard about the serious Christian intensity at the Passion conferences, so I have watched several sessions from the live Internet stream, and it is amazing.  Having Chris Tomlin lead a stadium full of young people in worshiping Christ impacts even those watching remotely.    I have watched the powerful teaching of Louie Giglio, Francis Chan and others and realize that something big is going on.   One focus of the event is to work to end slavery and human trafficking in the world.  Social action borne in the hearts of young people by strong Biblical teaching and devotion to the living Christ can transform the world.

The conference runs through early Friday afternoon, and I urge you to tune into some of the sessions and watch.  John Piper, the great preacher and writer from Minneapolis and Desiring God Ministries, will be preaching Thursday night.  You can also review the past sessions at the Passion 2013 website. You will be encouraged.  Take the time to watch this move of God as it happens.

It has become commonplace to observe that law and politics are “downstream” from culture.  In other words, our laws, generally speaking, are shaped and driven by the culture rather than the other way around.  To be sure, law often solidifies cultural trends, but it rarely creates, drives, or shapes them.  This relationship between culture and law came to mind a few times during the comparatively quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

The first occurred when my family and I played Hasbro’s “The Game of Life.”  Both my wife and I had enjoyed playing the game as children and thought it would be good fun for our family.  So we bought the new version, complete with the iPad app.  In case you’re not familiar with Life (as it’s called), the object of the game is to retire with the most money.  As each player winds his way through a simulated life, he makes decisions (e.g., pursuing a career immediately or going to college first) and encounters events (e.g., getting sued or winning the lottery).  Those decisions and events have financial consequences, and the iPad app keeps track of each player’s progress.  The game requires each player to get married.  My 11 year-daughter was the first to hit the “get married now” square on the game board.  She had previously “told” the iPad app that she was a girl, and she put a little pink peg in the driver’s seat of her car/game piece.  The app gave her a choice of spouses — a male or a female.  I suspected that there was more to this than a software quirk, and I was right.  Apparently, the original iPad app reflected the natural and traditional understanding of marriage, pairing players with opposite-sex spouses. But, predictably, that generated complaints.  It appears as though the game’s manufacturers responded to those complaints, disconnecting the app’s understanding of marriage from its real and natural definition.  That, in turn, generated counter-complaints, which had no effect. The game’s manufacturer picked a side.  All would agree that its choice would have been almost unthinkable a decade or two ago.

The second occurred when I was catching up on some scholarly reading, namely Entertainment Weekly‘s year-end issue.  One article was entitled, “This Was The Year That . . . Everyone Came Out in Parenthetical.”  The essential message of the piece was that when certain celebrities (e.g., CNN’s Anderson Cooper) announced that they were homosexual, there wasn’t much of a reaction.  The article’s first sentence nicely sums up its point:  “Some revolutions make headlines because they don’t make headlines.”  The article’s final paragraph resonates with my point about the relationship between culture and law:

The Hollywood closet isn’t going away, nor is antigay prejudice–although, happily, that’s being shoved into a closet of its own.  But it’s a measure of how well the entertainment industry has pioneered this issue, and how far we’ve come, that our focus is shifting to fields–sports and politics–in which bigoted rhetoric is slower to disappear.  EW has been covering this subject since 1990, and we’re not close to the end of the story yet. But as Churchill once said (not about gay people), it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Note that phrases like “antigay prejudice” and “bigoted rhetoric,” as understood by liberal Entertainment Weekly writers, include support for the natural and traditional definition of marriage.

The Game of Life and Entertainment Weekly are both part of “the culture” that drives and shapes law and politics.  And the shifting cultural consensus about homosexual behavior and the definition of marriage has profound consequences for the religious freedom of individuals and organizations.  Threats to their freedom don’t come out of the blue; the ongoing attack on marriage didn’t start with the introduction of legislation or the filing of lawsuits designed to alter the legal definition of marriage.  And the objective of these efforts is not simply to secure legal approval of homosexual conduct; it is to punish and marginalize those embrace the traditional understanding of marriage and sexual morality.  As the EW writer declares, such individuals and organizations are “being shoved into a closet of [their] own.”  Indeed.  This means that our longstanding national commitment to religious freedom will continue to be severely tested in the coming year, as cultural trends translate into legal and political efforts to push traditional religious believers “into a closet of their own.”

At Christmas, one would hope that the only controversy surrounding the Salvation Army and their iconic bell ringers would be their fictional dispute with Homelessville and Justin Timberlake.  But for a student body obsessed with political correctness at any cost, the mere presence of the bell ringers near campus doing their traditional collection of funds for the needy is intolerable if they are doing so in the name of a Christian organization.

As our friends at CampusReform.org reported, the student government at the University of California, Berkeley recently passed a resolution attempting to ban the bell ringers from campus.  Regardless of the fact that the Salvation Army helps millions of Americans every year, providing disaster relief, shelter, food, job training, community programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, youth camps, and many other programs, the Berkeley students sought to force administrators to revoke the bell ringers’ permits:

“Salvation Army church services, including charity services, are available only to people ‘who accept and abide by the Salvation Army’s doctrine and discipline,’ which excludes homosexuality . . . . Allowing the Salvation Army to collect donations on campus is a form of financial assistance that empowers the organization to spend the money it raises here in order to discriminate and advocate discrimination against queer people.”

The Berkeley students also felt it necessary to publicly condemn the Salvation Army, stating they wished to express

“disapproval of the presence of Salvation Army donation containers on campus” because “queer students…may take offense to the presence of collection containers operated by a discriminator religious organization in their places of living.”

Clearly the students felt that the purported “offense” to homosexual students outweighed both the right of the bell ringers to be on campus like others with permits, and the needs of the people the Salvation Army serves. (Despite the fact that record numbers of families are requesting assistance from the Salvation Army this Christmas.)  But the Salvation Army specifically denies the allegation that they discriminate on any basis—including sexual orientation—in providing their services to needy people.  And if the Berkeley students had just looked at the Salvation Army’s mission statement, available on their website, they would see that this is true:

“The Salvation Army, an international movement, is an evangelical part of the universal Christian church. Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.”

Ministry to the poor and needy has been a hallmark of the Christian Church from its earliest days—well before  government provided social services.  The Salvation Army bell ringers are merely carrying on this longstanding tradition of the Christian faith.  Ironically, the Berkeley student government has engaged in their own act of discrimination in attempting to evict these do-gooders from their campus simply because they work for a Christian organization, instead of letting students choose whether they want to drop their change in the red kettles.

I think it’s safe to say that they are on the naughty list this year.

Nobody likes discrimination.  (Except maybe when the question is whether Five Guys or In-N-Out burgers are better….  In-N-Out, clearly.)  You may be familiar with laws that protect you from unlawful discrimination.  The most common example is that your employer can’t fire you because of your race, religion, or other protect status.

But the recent movement to expand the principle of nondiscrimination on college campuses, through so-called nondiscrimination policies, has undermined the credibility of this important legal concept.

These days, colleges commonly use nondiscrimination policies to force Christian student groups to accept atheists and agnostics as members and leaders of the group.

The Evergreen State College is another recent example of a nondiscrimination policy gone wild.  Read for yourself:

A transgender woman said she was discriminated against after using the women’s locker room at Evergreen State College.

Colleen Francis was using the sauna in a women’s locker room inside the recreation center at the school late in September.

The same facility is used by two high school girls swim teams from Olympia, who also practice in the pool.

It turns out that Francis is biologically a man and was caught on multiple occasions sitting naked in the women’s locker room sauna.  What’s more, the sauna’s glass door not only allows the young girls to see Francis, but also allow him to see them while they are changing for swim practice.  When parents called the police multiple times, Evergreen responded by asserting that its nondiscrimination policy, which prohibits “gender identity” and “gender expression” discrimination, prevents it from telling Francis to leave.  Why?  Because he thinks he is a woman.

So someone who is biologically a male is using the women’s locker room while young girls, ages 6 to 18, are undressing for swim practice.  And Evergreen, a public college, is doing nothing to stop it.

That’s why Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter to Evergreen officials and reminded them of the legal liability they may face if anything happens to these young girls.  It’s a plain example of a so-called nondiscrimination policy trumping common sense.