GAY TRUTH

The word  Jesus  stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn't hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that "knowing Jesus" meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it. Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That's what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model. As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors i...

Image via Wikipedia Provost Thomas Burns of Belmont University in Nashville has announced in a statement that the evangelical Christian school has given official approval to its first homosexual student organization. Burns said that the decision to recognize the homosexualist group, which had twice before applied for, and been denied, club status, reflected an “ongoing campus dialogue about Christian faith and sexuality.” “This outcome represents many months of conversation, collaboration and cooperation between Belmont students, faculty and staff,” the statement read. In December 2010, Belmont was embroiled in controversy when the school dismissed women’s soccer coach Lisa Howe, after she told her team that she and her lesbian partner were expecting a baby. Belmont’s policy change follows a decision in January to add “sexual orientation” to the historically Baptist school’s anti-discrimination policy. The school, which had been affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention , ...