According to the Seattle Times (via World Magazine Blog) There are still Christian schools here on the “left coast” that won’t allow their male wrestlers to face female opponents. Of course neither the Seattle Times nor World Magazine mention how the logic of this policy would obviously have to be applied to gay students. Instead both articles fall back on heterosexism.
This reminds me of my friend Jordan Morris who attended Pepperdine University where a formal code of student conduct forbade visiting members of the opposite-sex from staying overnight in a student dorm room. This heterosexist policy ignored the existence of gay students such as Jordan allowing him and his boyfriend freedom other students could not enjoy.
Straight students must adhere to policies based on the “highest moral common denominator**” but gays and lesbians often enjoy freedom to adhere to morals derived from their own private relationship with their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
For the record, Pepperdine’s student conduct handbook also states:
“the University will offer counsel and assistance to support and strengthen the individual’s resolve to live consistently with Christian teaching on sexuality” (Source)
**If there’s any theological disagreement on an issue then err by forcing everyone to adopt the stricter viewpoint. Another such example is how Hume Lake Christian Camps forbade dancing during praise music worship when I attended in high school.
I’m not making it up I swear.
Dan
I know exactly what you mean. My dad was the pastor of our church so I had to live by a very rigid standard. It included:
no rock music
no dancing
no women in pants
no heavy make-up (I still like that one)
no shorts above the knee (this was the 70’s)
no going shirtless
no drinking
no bowling (not sure why that was a rule)
no movies
no television (do you have any idea what that’s like to not know who the Walton’s were?)
no “mixed-bathing” (boys and girls swimming together)
no long hair on boys
no point in staying in that Religion once I was old enough to leave home.
in retrospect, with so little to do, I guess it’s not surprising that there were so many Miracle Babies (ya know, the one’s that get there six or seven months after the teenagers get married)
oh well my family’s first church was Nazarene and they weren’t down with the whole mixed-bathing thing but being in Southern California people found more worthwhile things to get worked up about.
There are still Christian schools here on the “left coast” that won’t allow their male wrestlers to face female opponents.
A wag might suggest that these male christian wrestlers at don’t want to risk the fact that they might lose to a female wrestler.
I’m not a wag, so I wouldn’t suggest that. Not at all. But you get the idea.
I just noticed something.
How can any group demand Christian teaching on sexuality in a public school?
It’s not going to be consistent even in that context.
Are they going to teach about sassy kids and non virgin brides being stoned to death?
Are they going to teach about divorced women banised to the bushes to never marry again?
Are they going to learn the part about adulterers being stoned to death?
Or masturbation and seminal discharge from it being full of babies, so therefore a sin?
Or that females should be banished to a hut and not sleep with their men during menstruation?
There’s difference between sexuality and sexual irresponsibility.
When it comes to personal Biblical discipline, which is a choice to study-as opposed to selective literacy on how Scripture informed the masses back then as opposed to how we must live our lives now. We have to bring in the comprehensive and current knowlege on human sexuality.
There is no way religious influenced teaching will EVER square with that.
Educators have an obligation to ALL students, and to stop human education at 2,000 years ago on homosexuality, makes as much sense as stopping education on organ and blood donation and autopsy.
All of those have religious taboos too, but are anathema to human education and progress.