the back burner

Equality Ride

I'm surprised more people haven't posted about this. Are people posting and I just missed it? *deeply qualified nods to the dirty calvinist, in the sense of good for you for posting thoughtfully but i'm not necessarily in agreement* Below is an excerpt from an email we received from Marshall Rowe and the Alumni Office, followed by a couple of my thoughts.

"Late last semester an organization called Soulforce contacted Covenant to say they would like to bring the Equality Ride to our campus. The Equality Ride is a national bus tour of college campuses sponsored by Soulforce to challenge policies that they claim discriminate against homosexuals. This group targets colleges and universities that maintain a biblically-based stance on the issue of homosexuality, as Covenant does, and attempts to generate negative media attention to these institutions...

"We presented the organization with a proposed Letter of Agreement, to be signed by both Covenant and Equality Ride officials. The Letter of Agreement stipulated guidelines and a schedule for their visit. The schedule included meetings with key administrators, faculty, and student leaders in a designated room...

"Equality Ride officials stated that, while they would agree to not enter [sic] residence halls of distribute literature, they would not agree to only meet [sic] with designated people in a designated room; they want unsupervised access to roam the campus and meet with any student or community member. Because the Equality Ride officials have chosen not to accept our offer, we are considering not allowing them on our campus. We regret that they have chosen this course of action..."

The upshot of all this is that they're still coming. And possibly meeting with students off-campus. Here are my first thoughts, from an email to my friend (for some reason, I really thought it was called Equality Train, hence the E-Train reference... I really can't explain this):

"part of me is really mad at how heavy-handed the equality people seem, on this. granted, the alumni office is not an unbiased source. but i generally feel with events like this one that if i took away their 'race card,' THEY would be the bigots. 'hi, let's come into your community and tell you what you're doing wrong. and use potentially scary stuff to shake you loose.' of course, there's another part of me that's excited about the possibilities of (a) Covenant people learning new stuff and examining their grids, and (B) E-TRAIN people being exposed to COVENANT PEOPLE, nay, the GOSPEL. Hope that happens. Talk about rocking people's grids.

"in general, i'm expecting the e-train people to earn the same criticism from me that a lot of christians earn, by handing out easy answers and being formulaic. place your bets now, people."

Since writing that, I've had a few more criticisms pop into my mind concerning Covenant's administration, mostly concerning some of the language you see in this letter, but I'm not sure I would have done anything differently, so far. It's the responsibility of our faculty and staff to protect students and to model mature Christian thought and life for them. I see a lot of that in the administration's response, mixed of course with some "back off because you're really scary" reacting, which seems natural.

Of course, if the Equality Ride is eventually banned from our campus, I'll be sad. But I'm so out of the loop, that might well have already happened. When does all this go down, anyway?

Posted by nickles at February 15, 2007 04:54 AM | TrackBack