LGBT Activists and the Education Department Are Colluding against Christian Colleges

Author: Kresta in the Afternoon Published on: May 4, 2016 Published in: Race, Ethnicity, Gender

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If you’re not paying attention to one of the Left’s most cunning and furtive assaults on religious liberty and religious identity, now is the time. As I wrote in National Review last December, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — the nation’s most influential gay-rights lobby — released a report titled “Hidden Discrimination: Title IX Religious Exemptions Putting LGBT Students at Risk.” In it, HRC requested that the Department of Education publicly list the names of every college in the United States receiving a Title IX non-discrimination exemption.

Last week, HRC announced that the Department of Education would comply with their request and publish “a list of educational institutions who have received an exemption from federal civil rights law in order to discriminate against LGBT students.” This wonky policy suggestion is purportedly intended to generate greater transparency, but the effects and motive behind it are far more chilling. With the Department of Education bowing to the agenda of activists, a new page has been turned in the Left’s zero-sum assault on religious liberty.

Waivers exist under Title IX that allow religious colleges to seek exemptions from some federal non-discrimination statutes. This isn’t about allowing religious schools to discriminate against women or bar minorities from admittance. That type of discrimination is “invidious” — and prohibited. Rather, these waivers allow Christian colleges the ability to enforce long-held Christian moral expectations about sex, marriage, and gender as a condition of admittance and attendance.