Unfavorable feelings towards ideologies

[Ed Brayton]

Rick Duncan cites the following from the WorldMag article:
 
Other prominent voices from the academy have suggested that the
anti-evangelical bias does not likely translate into acts of classroom
discrimination. Tobin intends to test that claim with a subsequent
survey of 3,500 students in the coming academic year. "My guess: You
can't have this much smoke without some fire," he said. 
 
French can readily testify to that. Before the Alliance Defense Fund
filed a federal lawsuit last year, Georgia Tech University maintained
speech codes forbidding any student or campus group from making comments
on homosexuality that someone might subjectively deem offensive. What's
more, students serving as resident advisors were required to undergo
diversity training in which moral positions against homosexual behavior
were vilified and compared to justifying slavery with the Bible. 
 
I think this is backwards. I fully agree that the Georgia Tech speech
code was unconstitutional and I cheered when the ADF filed suit against
it and when the school settled the case and did away with the code. But
this is not evidence for the claim that disagreement with evangelical
views leads to discrimination, for two reasons:
 
First, because not all evangelicals hold such views or would violate
such speech codes. 
 
Second, because regardless of whether such speech codes are a good idea
(and again, I regard them as a very bad thing, clearly unconstitutional
and would like to see them all done away with at every public university
in the country), the causality may go the other way - the fact that so
many evangelical Christians take anti-gay positions is one of the
reasons why so many disapprove of their religious ideology and criticize
it. 
 
Again, there simply is no intrinsic or logical link between disagreeing
with or criticizing an ideology and discriminating against it. Don't we
hear this from many Christians, that just because they think
homosexuality is wrong doesn't mean they want to discriminate against
homosexuals? Why, then, should we equate thinking Christianity is wrong
with wanting to discriminate against Christians?
 
Nor should we casually equate wanting to rid a diverse academic
community of anti-gay bigotry with wanting to discriminate against
Christians. While, again, I think all such speech codes are wrong and
unconstitutional, I think one should accurately portray the motivations
of those who support them. Their motivation is to protect gay and
lesbian students from bigotry that makes them feel dehumanized. The fact
that their desire to protect gays in this manner happens to affect
primarily Christian students (and, I would suspect, Muslim students as
well) is merely a function of the undeniable fact that it is precisely
those groups that are most likely to take anti-gay positions. But such
policies are not passed for the purpose of attacking Christianity; they
are passed for the purpose of protecting gays. That they affect
Christians more than non-Christians is merely a function of the
popularity of anti-gay views among Christians (or at least a certain
subset of them). Again, I don't think those motivations make such codes
legitimate, but let's at least state them accurately.
 
Ed Brayton
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