The club’s transgression? Harvard University has reprimanded a student Christian club for one year because its members pressured a female student leader to resign in September 2017 following her decision to date a woman.”, as reported by the Harvard Crimson.
Harvard College Faith and Action (HCFA) a thriving Christian student group was birthed in 2008 and is resourced by the Christian Union. Starting as a small group of eight freshmen studying the Bible together and then gained recognition from the College as an official student organization a year later.
The HCFA group reportedly has over 200 regular members attending Bible Courses and other weekly activities as of today.
The leaders of the HCFA Christian club said that they didn’t believe they violated any school policy, as they are a faith group based on Christian principals.
A college spokesman confirmed in an e-mail that the Harvard Faith and Action group has been placed on a one-year “academic probation.” The university has also said that if the club re-registers as a student organization next spring it will have to show that it is in compliance with the university’s “nondiscrimination principals.” Liberal hypocrisy one might add?
According to the Harvard Crimson, the action of asking the former leader to step down after they learned she was dating another woman violated guidelines in the Student Handbook, which states that student groups cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
Aaron Goldman, Harvard spokesman said the Office of Student Life was alerted to the group’s actions in December 2017 and found it had conducted itself in a manner “grossly inconsistent” with the Student Handbook, he wrote in an e-mail.
“To be clear: Harvard is disciplining a Christian student group for the group’s expectation that its student leadership follow basic Christian ethical teaching on sexuality in accordance with Christianity’s 2,000-year-old doctrine on such matters.”
A statement from HCFA reads:
“We are an autonomous student group, and we do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation,” Molly Richmond, a co-president of the group, wrote in an e-mail Thursday afternoon. Richmond did not respond to questions about whether the group had asked the woman to step down and why.
Richmond said the club has operated at Harvard for more than 10 years and its policies and practices have remained unchanged.
“The college seems to believe despite our repeated assurances to the contrary that HCFA is not acting autonomously and that our leadership standards were applied unfairly,” she wrote.
What to make of this? Well, a lot.
The question is whether evangelicals will support this HCFA and remain true to the teachings of Scripture and the unbroken teaching of the Christian church for over two thousand years on the morality of same-sex acts and the institution of marriage.
Society is pressing this question upon us—voices that are calling for a radical revision of the church’s understanding of the Bible, sexual morality, and the meaning of marriage.
So now Harvard has resulted to disciplining a Christian student group—and not some radical fringe group, but the largest Christian group on campus—for the group’s expectation that its student leadership follows Christian ethical teachings on sexuality. So much for diversity?
For almost 2,000 years Christianity has spoken with one voice about homosexual behavior, calling it a sin. At the same time, the Church taught God’s design for sexuality — that marriage is the life-long, exclusive union of a husband and wife and the only place for sexual activity.
Harvard is a special case on this teaching as the school was founded explicitly on Protestant, even Puritan, faith and is now penalizing a group for holding to religious convictions that would have been identical to its founders’ views.
Unfortunately, according to other news sources, it seems as though anti-Christian discrimination is now the only form of bigotry acceptable at the modern university today.
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