Rice's Band Tackles Baylor's Homophobia

Inside Higher Ed | Elin Johnson | September 23, 2019

Rice University's marching band has taken a stance against Baylor University's anti-LGBTQ statements and stood in solidarity with its students.

The two Texas universities' football teams played each other Saturday; at halftime, the Marching Owl Band formed the word "pride" on the field while waving rainbow pride flags and playing "YMCA" by the Village People, reports the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Baylor, a Christian university, released a statement earlier alluding that they supported "biblical notions" of sexuality and did not support the charter of an LGBTQ organization.

Baylor went on to beat Rice 21 to 13.

This has not been the first time Rice's band has been a bit tongue-in-cheek. The weekend before they formed "2.89" in reference to the University of Texas football team's "record high" grade point average.

Hundreds pack into room to hear Christian LGBTQ author speak at BU

KWTX | Chris Shadrock | September 18, 2019

Nearly 500 filled into the conference room atop the Cashion Academy Center on the Baylor campus Tuesday evening to listen to an influential Christian LGBTQ author speak about faith and sexuality.

The room was so filled, several people could be seen standing in the back to listen.

Justin Lee was at the university for a two-day visit where he also spoke to student in classes.

Dr. Jon E. Singletary was named dean of the Garland School of Social Work gave opening remarks and welcomed LGBTQ students to university and says they’re welcomed.

The talk was open to students and the public, sitting in the front row was President Linda Livingstone’s husband, filling-in while the university’s leader was away on travel, and some members of the Board of Regents.

Weaving humor into his talk, Lee did not shy away confronting the serious issues facing homosexuality and Christianity saying, “When we talk about issues we need to talk about people’s stories.”

He told the audience he realized at 18 he was gay, but struggled to accept what that looked like for him.

While unlike other topics, he also addressed this conversation is not something the Church has had before.

“Where does the body of Christ go from here? This is a new conversation for the church, how to address homosexuality, bisexual and transgender people.”

The end of his talk focused on how the straight community can work to better welcome the LGBTQ community.

He said the church needs to be empathetic to people. “It’s our burden to share,” he said.

Though contrary to how some might interrerpt the Bible, Lee pointed to scripture as why the church needed to embrace everyone.

“That night sound extreme, but the Bible points to helping those in need from widows, to the hungry and the LGBTQ community,” he said. “Christ lived and died for us. We need to be shining examples.”

He ended his talk speaking directly to the LGBTQ members in attendance.

“You have something important to add to the body of Christ. Your experience has given you empathy. Your faith has gotten stronger because you fought for it … use your gifts and don’t let any one tell you aren’t welcomed. God loves you. God wants to use you. So go be the church.”

Baylor to host discussion LGBTQ Christian author Justin Lee

Waco Tribune | Rhiannon Saegert | September 16, 2019

A leading proponent of building bridges between churches and LGBTQ Christians will speak Tuesday at Baylor University, where debates over sexuality and faith have come to the forefront.

The Baylor School of Social Work is hosting a discussion with Justin Lee, a nationally known author and founder of the Gay Christian Network.

Lee will speak at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday on the fifth floor of the Cashion Academic Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Lee, author of “Torn” and “Talking Across the Divide,” has been writing about his experiences as a gay Christian since the late ‘90s. He founded the Gay Christian Network, now called the Q Christian Fellowship, in 2001, later parting with the organization in 2017. In his Baylor appearance he aims to discuss the way the Christian churches have handled LGBTQ issues in the past and how to better address them in the present.

“I’m not coming to give a theological talk on same-sex marriage or anything like that,” Lee said in an interview Monday. “My goal is to be able to speak to Christians on all sides of the theological disagreements and just focus on how we take care of people who are, right now, not always being cared for.”

He said debates about theology can often turn abstract, but he wants to focus more on students’ tangible experiences.

“We have to stop and say ‘What does this mean for the person sitting in the pews, for the student who is here at Baylor who is LGBTQ or who is wrestling with questions?’ “ Lee said. “What does all this mean for that person, realistically? What does it mean for Christian institutions and individuals in terms of how we treat people better?”

Lee said in his experience, it’s important for LGBTQ students to have ample opportunity to discuss their lives the way anyone would. Lee said after growing up Southern Baptist, speaking with other LGBTQ students in college and realizing he wasn’t the only one was crucial to him.

“For many LGBTQ students coming from conservative Christian homes, they’re already bringing a lot of cultural baggage and loneliness from growing up in the church,” Lee said. “It can be very difficult to work through all of that in a place like Baylor.”

Lee said there’s been rapid culture shifts in the way people think about and understand gender and sexuality within the last decade.

“It’s made people realize there’s a lot of people going through things they never knew they were going through who haven’t been well-served by the church in these areas,” Lee said. “That has really set off a lot of questions for Christians and Christian institutions that we haven’t really been focusing on for much of the church’s history.”

He said in his experience, Christian institutions can best navigate those questions when LGBTQ people whose lives will be impacted are involved in every level of the discussion.

“Those are not easy questions to work through, but I think it’s going to be really important that we not treat this as an issue to be resolved in the absence of human beings, but that we recognize that all of these conversations are ultimately about the lives of these LGBTQ students,” Lee said.

Lee’s appearance is part of Baylor’s 2019-2020 Conversation Series, which focuses on civil conversation about difficult topics. Diana R. Garland School of Social Work Dean Jon Singletary said Lee is not the first LGBTQ speaker at Baylor, but he may be the first to speak in an open venue rather than as part of a single class’ curriculum.

“This is the first time we’ve had someone with his profile at an event that is university-wide and really community-wide to promote a much larger conversation about our understandings of sexuality and as a way of wrestling with how to support our LGBTQ students,” Singletary said.

Singletary said the invitation was partially in recognition of LGBTQ students’ needs, which have been the subject of ongoing discussion since an open letter this spring calling for official recognition of Baylor’s unofficial LGBTQ student group, Gamma Alpha Upsilon, or GAY. The petition garnered more than 3,000 signatures, including those of Baylor alumni, donors and professors.

“It’s all part of how we talk about difficult issues, whether it’s part of our policy where there’s disagreement or part of the larger church conversation that it’s connected to, or values differences,” Singletary said.

Singletary said officials the School of Social Work have been encouraged by the support they’ve received. He said bringing in a speaker like Lee fits the school’s goal of educating future social workers who can work with people whose experiences may differ from their own.

“The university has been largely supportive of it,” Singletary said. “Now we know there’s a number of people who wouldn’t want us to be doing this, and disagreement, and we feel like there are conversations that will come about as a result of this.”

GAY Outreach Chair Hayden Evans said his group is barred from inviting speakers themselves as an unofficial student group.

“I’m hopeful that with Justin Lee coming to campus … that his talk will spur more action for others to gain a better understanding of the dynamic between Christianity and LGBTQ+ persons and understand that they’re not separate, they can be integrated and then hopefully people will be more supportive in our discussions and in our push for the university to recognize the need, in terms of safety and in terms of community, for LGBTQ + persons on campus,” he said.

Evans said the group’s charter was officially rejected by the Department of Student Life earlier this month, as it has been several times in recent years. A Baylor spokesperson confirmed that the charter had been rejected.

After Charter Denial, Baylor LGBTQ Group Pushes Forward

Dallas Observer | SILAS ALLEN | SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

For the last eight years, a group of Baylor University students has been trying to persuade the school to allow them to form an LGBTQ student group.

Earlier this month, the group got an official answer from the university. It wasn't the one they'd hoped for.

Baylor officials notified members of the student group Gamma Alpha Upsilon — or GAY — on Sept. 6 that the university was denying the group's request for a charter. A charter represents official recognition from the university, which would give the group access to student activity funds, allow them to reserve space on campus for meetings and allow them to advertise events on campus.

That notification came just days after Baylor President Linda Livingstone released a statement on human sexuality on the university's website. In it, Livingstone wrote that the university "affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God."

"Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm," Livingstone wrote. "Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching."

Despite that denial, the group will continue trying to pressure the university to give it official recognition, said Anna Conner, a Baylor senior and Gamma Alpha Upsilon president. Conner, a Houston native, thinks the university is trying to wait the group out. Most of the group's leaders will be graduating in the next year or two, and she suspects university officials hope the matter will die once those students leave campus.

"It doesn't seem like they plan on making any action, at least not while I'm here," Conner said.

In an Aug. 27 email to students, faculty and staff, Livingstone said that, although the university's policy on human sexuality remains unchanged, the university can do more to support its LGBTQ students. Livingstone said university officials began holding conversations in the summer of 2018 about how the university could better support underrepresented groups, including LGBT students.

Out of those conversations came a number of themes, she said: the need for better training on how to support LGBTQ students; the need for opportunities for civil discussions about LGBTQ issues; and the need to establish trust with LGBTQ students so that they feel comfortable seeking out the resources the university offers.

"Meanwhile, as we begin the fall semester, we pledge to continue these ongoing conversations with faculty, students, staff, alumni and members of our LGBTQ community and to provide support for all of our students in keeping with Baylor’s Christian mission," Livingstone wrote. "We are all part of the Baylor Family and are called by Christ to love one another."

Gamma Alpha Upsilon was founded in 2011 under the name Sexual Identity Forum. Since then, its leaders have been seeking official recognition from the university. But for eight years, the university has denied the group a charter.

Baylor, the world's largest Baptist university, was founded by the Dallas-based Baptist General Convention of Texas. For decades, the university's student code of conduct banned "homosexual acts," calling them "a misuse of God's gift." Then, in 2015, the Baylor Board of Regents quietly lifted that ban. LGBTQ rights advocates celebrated the change, calling it a step in the right direction.

A flyer for a campus speech by conservative commentator Matt Walsh featured an LGBTQ flag with a hammer and sickle superimposed over it.

But Conner, 21, said unequal treatment of LGBTQ students has persisted since then. In April, Baylor Young Americans for Freedom, a university-approved conservative student group, hosted a lecture by Matt Walsh, a commentator for the conservative website The Daily Wire. Walsh's speech was titled "Why the Left Has Set Out to Redefine Life, Gender and Marriage." The group posted promotional flyers on campus bearing the LGBTQ rainbow flag with a hammer and sickle superimposed over it.

Last week, the group announced it will host a guest lecture from Daily Wire editor in chief Ben Shapiro in November. An opponent of LGBTQ rights, Shapiro has warned that “the gay marriage caucus” is “utilizing the law as a baton to club wrong-thinking religious people into acceptance of homosexuality." He is especially hostile to transgender people, who he says are suffering from mental illness.

Conner said the group doesn't object in principle to people like Shapiro and Walsh being able to speak on campus. But if those views are allowed an audience at Baylor, she thinks Gamma Alpha Upsilon deserves equal treatment and an equal platform.

"It seems reasonable, but apparently it's not," she said.

Lori Fogleman, a Baylor spokeswoman, noted that the university is hosting a conversation series during the fall semester focusing on civil discourse. On Tuesday, Christian LGBTQ author Justin Lee will give a speech at Baylor's Cashion Academic Center titled "Christianity and LGBTQ+ Persons."

Last April, more than 3,000 people signed a petition asking the university to recognize Gamma Alpha Upsilon. Among the signatories were current students, alumni and current and former faculty members. Conner said most of the faculty, including religion professors, have been openly supportive of the organization. A few university officials whose positions precluded them from signing the petition contacted members of the group to offer their support, she said.

But there's also an outspoken minority on campus that's hostile to the organization, she said. Mostly those people just shout ugly slurs, she said. But some of the group's members have been threatened on campus and told not to go to group meetings, she said. In one case, one of the group's members was walking to her car after finishing a late-night shift at a campus job when she noticed someone was following her, Conner said.

Incidents like those are examples of why an LGBTQ group is needed at Baylor, Conner said. The university can be an uncomfortable place for LGBTQ students, she said. Many of them feel isolated and alone, nervous about having come to Baylor in the first place. Having a recognized student group that can make those students know they're welcome would help allay some of those feelings.

Although the group still doesn't have the official recognition it had hoped for, Conner said it's been encouraging to see the support LGBTQ students have received on campus — even if that support hasn't come from the university's administration.

"For the most part," she said, "Baylor is very welcoming."

New semester, same frustrations for LGBTQ students at Baylor

Houston Chronicle | Brittany Britto | September 5, 2019

It may be the start of a new semester, but frustrations largely remain the same for many LGBTQ students at Baylor University.

After months of putting pressure on Baylor administration and its Board of Regents to meet with and formally recognize its LGBTQ student group, Gamma Alpha Upsilon, the students finally received a response from University President Linda Livingstone, but it wasn’t the one that they had hoped for, according to Hayden Evans, a second-year graduate student, outreach chair and treasurer for the group.

In a letter addressed to the university community on Aug. 27, Livingstone stated that “Baylor is committed to providing a loving and caring community for all students — including our LGBTQ students.”

But Livingstone pointed to the university’s newly launched webpage, which includes its human sexuality statement and sexual conduct policy in the hope of conveying the “university’s values and expectations.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: More than 3,000 petition for Baylor to recognize LGBTQ student group

The statement notes that “the university affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God” and that “Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm.” Its sexual conduct policy also states that it is “expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching,” which include “heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.”

Livingstone further emphasized that the university is in compliance with Title IX as well as state and federal regulations in terms of the services and support it provides for LGBTQ students.

She also pointed to multiple resources provided for LGBTQ students through school organizations, including the Title IX office, the Chaplain’s Office and Spiritual Life, and its Counseling Center, which Livingstone noted does not practice or condone conversion therapy. The president also noted that students are not disciplined or expelled for same-sex attraction.

“With this said, we understand that we must do more to demonstrate love and support for our students who identify as LGBTQ,” Livingstone wrote, adding that it has been suggested that the university provide “more robust and more specific training” for students, faculty and staff in regard to LGBTQ students, and more opportunities for civil dialogue.

“And, perhaps most importantly,” she wrote, “we need to establish trust with our LGBTQ students so that, among other things, they might seek out the resources provided by Baylor — all of which must be done as a faithful expression of our Christian mission.”

Despite the lengthy letter, many LGBTQ students and alumni said they found Livingstone’s statement disingenuous.

“I’m appreciative of her that she made the statement at all and so publicly,” Evans said. Livingstone’s letter, he said, has allowed people to see some of the fight Gamma Alpha Upsilon has gone through to be recognized and included as a group on campus since its inception in 2011 as the Sexuality Identity Forum.

“But,” Evans added, “I also think it’s a hollow response.”

Justin Davis from Washington state graduated from Baylor in 2009 and agreed with Evans. He said little has changed from his time at the university a decade ago.

“To me, it indicates when these policies become more targeted, but less specific, they’re basically meant to discourage dissent, protest or advocacy,” Davis said.

“I think they’re soft-pedaling this ‘loving and caring community’ thing without taking actual steps.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: Baylor drops longstanding ban on ‘homosexual acts’

The private Baptist university’s refusal to recognize Gamma Alpha Upsilon, or “GAY” in Greek letters, as an official student group has prevented them from receiving certain privileges, including the opportunity to advertise events on campus, reserve university spaces for meetings, and to receive funding through the student government.

In May, more than 3,000 Baylor University alumni, students, staff and former faculty signed a petition addressed to university officials supporting the group’s fight to be recognized. Since then, Gamma Alpha Upsilon has requested to meet with the university’s Board of Regents — the entity that Livingstone said established its human sexuality policy. That request was declined.

Rumors of the school’s alleged loose ties to conversion therapy — treatments that are supposed to turn gay people straight — have also floated around among Baylor’s LGBTQ community. They involve links between Dennis Wiles, a member of the university’s Board of Regents, vice chair of the student life committee, and pastor of First Baptist Church in Arlington, and his partner church Living Hope Ministries.

Living Hope Ministries, described on its website as “a Christ-centered, Biblical world-view of sexual expression rooted in one man and one woman in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual marriage for life.” hosts a 20-week “intensive, discipleship program” designed to “assist those who have sexual and relational struggles of any kind in their life.”

Late last year, Apple pulled a Living Hope Ministries app from its online store, NBC News reported at the time. And in March, Google shut down a Living Hope Ministries app that promoted conversion therapy, according to reports by Business Insider.

But Jason Cook, a spokesman at Baylor, said “Dr. Wiles has indicated Living Hope Ministries does not do conversion therapy,” adding that the church is a “discipleship, peer-based ministry.”

Cook also emphasized that although Wiles, one of 41 members of Baylor’s Board of Regents, is vice chair of the university’s student life division, Wiles still has to consult and work with the rest of the board to make decisions.

“It’s unfair to cherry-pick an alleged belief of motive, and then ascribe them to the entire board,” Cook said, adding that there are many diverse-points of views on the board, some of which are LGBTQ-affirming.

“There’s a lot of misinformation that is intentionally being spread regarding this issue. We’re trying to be very clear and keep this on a factual-based discussion,” Cook said. “We’re trying to provide clarity regarding the university’s practices and we have demonstrated that we are willing to discuss the issues that our LGBTQ students face. That’s significant progress.”

Evans, the outreach chair and treasurer of the campus group, countered that saying Baylor’s administration is “doing minimal, if any, changes here at the university.”

In July, Evans attempted to “(go) up the chain of commands” by emailing the Big 12 and NCAA organizations in hopes that they could push Baylor to be more inclusive and have a conversation, but Evans said both organizations have said that the university is in compliance with their standards. A spokesman for the Big 12 conference declined to comment in response to Houston Chronicle’s requests, and the NCAA never responded to inquiries.

Since then, there have been some new developments.

Evans said that an open discussion — likely the first to ever take place between university administration and Gamma Alpha Upsilon — will happen soon. And on Sept. 17, Justin Lee, an author and founder of a Christian LGBTQ organization, will speak at the university’s Cashion Academic Center — in an event hosted by the university’s School of Social Work.

Still, Skye Perryman, Jackie Baugh Moore, and Tracy Teaff, the Baylor alumni who authored the letter that received 3,000 signatures calling for Baylor’s inclusion of LGBTQ students, said in a statement that though dialogue is a part of academic life and can be useful, “this is an effort about real people who are in the Baylor family living their lives as dialogue about their civil rights is happening around them.”

“Until all members of the Baylor family, including LGBTQ+ people, are afforded equal opportunities to participate fully in campus life, our work is not done,” the alumni group told the Chronicle.

“We and thousands of others look forward to helping Baylor move forward and urge it to adopt policies that are in line with its academic and athletic peers.”

LGBTQ group sets sights on official charter

Baylor Lariat | Carson Lewis | August 23, 2019

The group is composed of Baylor students, has a president and officer positions and meets weekly for group activities. It functions in the same way as many Baylor clubs with activities like discussions and bowling nights. But this group of students can’t claim to have what other organizations have: an official charter from the university. That’s what they want to change.

Gamma Alpha Upsilon (ΓAY), an unofficial LGBTQ group on campus, is looking to the new semester with hopes of becoming an official chartered organization. Formerly known as SIF (Sexual Identity Forum), Gamma has functioned on campus since 2011 as an independent group with the purpose of giving a home to LGBTQ Baylor students and allies.

Members in the group expressed their appreciation and surprise last year from the support given to a letter sent by three Baylor alumni to administration which proposed acceptance for LGBTQ groups on campus.

“We ask that the university reconsider its exclusion of student organizations that are designed to provide a community for individuals in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (“LGBTQ”) and allied community,” part of the letter read. The letter accumulated over 3,200 signatures from Baylor students, faculty, alumni and supporters who agreed with the message.

Plano senior Elizabeth Benton, president of Gamma, described the group’s positive reaction to the news last semester.

“It’s nice to know that even people outside of Baylor support us… I honestly didn’t think anybody would care about this, really, besides LGBT people,” Benton said. “It’s so gratifying to hear people talk about that and to meet alumni that were LGBT at Baylor and want to help out. It’s absolutely amazing.”

The group used to meet weekly at 8 p.m. Thursdays at Bill Daniel Student Union Building but will meet away from their usual spot this semester, choosing instead Seventh and James Baptist Church.

Despite having a functional home for the group in the SUB next to Common Grounds, several members of Gamma said they’ve found reasons to move their meetings off campus while the group is unchartered.

Searcy, Ark., grad student Hayden Evans, Gamma’s treasurer, described some of the problems that the group had with the location.

“It’s very, very loud. They typically play music, and of course there’s tons of students all around talking and going about their day. It’s very distracting for us the whole meeting, especially when we invite people from outside the university to speak,” Evans said. “Also, people are uncertain about how they will be perceived… some people don’t come because they are afraid of the repercussions of them being seen there. We’re trying to move to a more private area.”

Benton echoed the statement made by Evans, saying that some prospective members of Gamma felt that the location wasn’t as private as they would have liked.

“I’ve talked to some people who have been threatened if they go to Gamma meetings,” Benton said. “There are people I know, people I talked to, who would come to our meetings and they just stopped coming. I asked, ‘Why don’t you come anymore?’ [They] would be threatened. They seemed scared. This happens a lot actually.”

As an official chartered organization at Baylor, Gamma would be able to rent rooms from the SUB for their meetings and events and advertise on campus to prospective members during events like fall semester’s Late Night.

Houston senior Anna Conner, vice president of Gamma, and other group members insist that being official would greatly help them in their mission to provide a safe space for members of the LGBTQ community on Baylor’s campus.

“People have a perception of what we’re trying to do. They think that we’re trying to go in and rip up this tradition that Baylor has and say, ‘No, we’re no longer a Christian university, you have to accept us because it’s 2019 and everyone needs to change,’” Conner said. “What we’re trying to do is create a space where people can have a conversation, maybe learn a few things and meet new people that have different viewpoints. The biggest challenge [this year] will be to get people to understand that.”

In a July 24 Office of the President email, Jerry K. Clements, chair of the Board of Regents, and president Dr. Linda Livingstone expressed that the board seeks to continue discussion about how to best include and provide support for LGBTQ students.

“The Board continued discussions that began at last summer’s retreat about providing a loving and caring community for all students, including those who identify as LGBTQ,” the email read. “This is an issue with which many faith-based colleges and universities – and our churches – struggle. We believe that Baylor is in a unique position to meet the needs of our LGBTQ students because of our Christian mission and the significant campus-wide support we already provide all students.”

Pressuring Christian Universities to Be Affirming

Baylor students are trying to secure the LGBTQ support I wish I had when I was a student there

The Salve | Madeline Kay Sneed | July 1, 2019

I’m not sure what to say when people ask me about God.

It’s not a common conversation, especially on the East Coast, where I now live. The subject rarely comes up. When some people find out I went to Baylor University, the largest Baptist university in the world, they make their assumptions about my faith. When they find out I’m a lesbian, their assumptions are undone and replaced with another about my absence of faith.

To be from Texas, to be a lesbian, to be a Christian; it’s too contradictory, too confusing. The Baptist schools I went to never made an effort to question this notion of contradiction. If you’re a Christian, you’re saved. If you’re queer, you’re damned.

Recently, more than 3,000 Baylor University alumni, students, and faculty signed a petition in support of Gamma Alpha Upsilon, an LGBTQ+ student group at the university. The university has consistently denied the group official recognition because of Baylor’s human sexuality statement, which says, in part, that “Temptations to deviate from this [biblical] norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

The petition was launched in response to a university-approved event held by the Baylor Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), who hosted Matt Walsh on campus. Walsh is an online political blogger for Daily Wire who regularly argues against left-leaning ideologies and policies. He often uses his platform to diminish and mock the experiences of LGBTQ communities. For example, on Dec. 5, 2017, he tweeted, “By the way, ‘LGBT rights’ aren’t a thing. It means nothing. You don’t have any special rights due to your sexual proclivities. Religious rights, on the other hand, are real and fundamental to our foundation as a country.”

The Baylor petition in question does not seek to “stop Mr. Walsh from visiting Baylor’s campus” and it is not requesting “[to] remove Baylor YAF as an official student organization.” Instead, the petition aims to “illustrate the fundamental unfairness of the University’s treatment of other student groups, particularly those seeking to provide community to students who identify as LGBTQ allies.”

Essentially, the petition is asking Baylor President Dr. Linda Livingstone and the Board of Regents to stop rejecting the requests of groups like Gamma Alpha Upsilon to become official student groups on campus. Without an official student group status, queer students and allies cannot receive funding from the student government, cannot meet in an official capacity, and are not recognized as legitimate by their institution.

They can meet unofficially, of course, but Baylor will not acknowledge them. They are allowed to stay in the darkness, but they can never come into the light. In the name of Jesus, the school is saying, “You aren’t good enough to be seen. We do not want you. You do not fit in here. There is no seat at the table for you.”

This is not an issue unique to Baylor. According to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, there are more than 150 Christian-affiliated colleges in the United States and Canada. Many of these schools have human sexuality statements, similar to Baylor’s, that reject LGBTQ student activity on campus. Institutions affiliated with Christianity often prioritize policies that will protect their funding from affluent alumni and conservative organizations over policies that will project light and love.

Fear, exclusion, shame; these values are at the heart of rejection. Empathy, love, listening; these values are at the heart of Jesus.

I know how harmful it can be when the values of rejection dictate institutions’ policies and decision-making

I know how harmful it can be when the values of rejection dictate institutions’ policies and decision-making. I know what it’s like to have an institution de-value a component of who you are, to let you know, in no uncertain terms, that you do not deserve to be seen. It happened to me, for many years, at Baylor and other institutions like it.

Growing up as a closeted lesbian in Baptist institutions, I learned to become numb, to disconnect from my desires. I never hated myself, but I did refuse to see myself. I ignored my instincts, my crushes, my feelings; I lied to everyone around me, including myself; I poured my attention into other people’s lives, never letting anyone get too close.

I saw myself as more of a brain than a body.

The repression for me was rooted in a lack of definition. I wouldn’t acknowledge the feelings I had or the attractions I felt. The purity culture of evangelical communities — save sex for marriage — allowed me to easily hide my apparent lack of sexual interest. No one around me was having sex, talking about sex, and if they were thinking about sex, never let any of us know. When I felt a distinct twist in my stomach when a pretty girl hugged me, I reasoned I was just happy to see her. My feelings of attraction were attached to nothing. I saw myself as more of a brain than a body.

At my Christian high school, we had to attend chapel services every week. I always felt claustrophobic during them. The uniform was formal: starched white oxford blouses, school-approved length navy skirts, mandatory navy knee socks. We assembled in the freezing, freshly renovated chapel that still smelled vaguely of sawdust. There were huge windows on either side of a wooden cross that hung above the stage, where speakers (almost always men) delivered various sermons that were amplified by wireless headset microphones.

My high school did not mince words during any of their themed chapels: not during the ones on alcohol, not during the ones on sex before marriage, and especially not during the ones on the sins that were truly abominable, like masturbation and atheism and homosexuality.

During the service on homosexuality my junior year, a pastor from a megachurch in Houston delivered the message. He talked about the dangers of homosexuals. That you could love them from a distance, but know that loving them will always break your heart because they will never be saved and cannot spend eternity in paradise.

During the course of his sermon, I sat shivering, listening with rapt attention, internalizing every word, thinking, Homosexuality equals hell, and you’re a Christian, and Christians don’t go to hell, so what you’re feeling is not homosexuality, you are better than that, you are stronger than that, you can beat this, bury everything as far down as you can so no one can ever find it and know who you really, truly are, all the while trying desperately not to think about the strange, out-of-place feelings I’d had for women since I turned 13.

At dinner that night, my family talked about the chapel service.

“Well, that’s a little dramatic,” my mom said. I had just retold the pastor’s last story about someone in his family who died of AIDS. He said, it broke my heart to see him go, but I was even more devastated by this simple knowledge: I would never see him again. He never repented of his sins. He would live in hell, for forever, for the life and love he lived out. “And there is absolutely all judgment and no love in that. Which is ridiculous. But still. You know, if you or Hayden ended up gay — ”

“God, Mom!” Hayden, my brother, choked on his chicken and coughed dramatically. “Don’t even say that. It’s not going to happen.”

“I know,” my mom handed him some water to help with the coughing. “But ifeither one of you were. Or decided to be. Or whatever it is. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound casual, cool, and inevitably failing to do both.

“Well,” my mom narrowed her eyes at me, like she could read my thoughts (my own fear projected), then moved past it. “Well, it just makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like it. And imagine what my friends would say. I want you guys to have what your dad and I found. You know, before I met David…”

It always came back to this. My parents wanted my brother and I to be happy in the specific way that they were. It was their only real reference for love.

“I don’t want y’all to be hurt,” my mom continued. “I want you to find love. True love, not just desire or sex or whatever it is that they have. I want you to experience this kind of marriage. And it takes a man and a woman for that to happen.”

After dinner, I helped clean up the kitchen, asked if I could be excused, and sprinted upstairs to run a bath. The water was scalding and steam rose up from it, blowing away from me with the ventilation fan roaring like white noise.

I slipped into the tub and dunked my head under water. When I came up for air, I whispered,

“Father, keep me safe.”

What I really meant: Protect my friends from my desires.

Another dunk, another whisper.

“Father, forgive me for neglecting your truth.”

Help me bury this feeling forever.

It was a homemade baptism: desperate, driven by guilt and shame.

“Make me more like you.”

Keep me straight, keep me straight, please, God, keep me straight.

Brené Brown, the research professor and storyteller known for her TED Talk on vulnerability, defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging — something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

This shame was at the heart of my baptisms. I did them for years. Drowning myself, my desires, trying to come up clean and pure and good enough to love.

I came out when I was 24. Afterward, my best friend told me that for the past 14 years, she had resolved herself to the fact that there was a wall within me that she could never break down. I was someone you could never get to know. I was so afraid of that, of letting someone truly know me, because I didn’t believe I was deserving of love. All of my life, I had been told by Baylor and other places like it that my desires were perverse, deserving of punishment, and impossible to love.

Shame lives in the dark. It thrives in it. For years, I walked around blind. I couldn’t see myself. I couldn’t let others see me. I was lost. I parroted verses from the Bible about grace and love and light. But the very institutions that tried so desperately to get me to conform to their ideologies were preventing me from understanding the foundational truth of Christianity: love God and love others. But I was afraid of love. Fear, exclusion, shame; rejection ruled my whole life. I had enveloped myself in a cloud of darkness and convinced myself I was seeing the sun.

1 John 4:18 reads, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

Why do the institutions that claim to perpetuate this perfect love cultivate so much fear in those who don’t conform? Those who are different? The outsiders?

The late Rachel Held Evans, a Christian writer and fierce ally for LGBTQ+ folks, published a six-part series on her blog discussing Matthew Vines’ book, God and the Gay Christian. In the final installment, she writes:

It is time we accept the reality God has not created a rigid, one-dimensional world when it comes to gender and sexuality…Matthew addresses the incredible damage done by Christians who teach LGBT people to hate their sexuality, which cannot so easily be separated from their very selves. “When we tell people that their every desire for intimate, sexual bonding is shameful and disordered,” he writes, “we encourage them to hate a core part of who they are.”

It wasn’t until much later, after I had left Texas and moved to Boston, that I discovered other Christians, like Rachel Held Evans, who received queer people with gentle kindness, acceptance, celebration, and love. Through Twitter, I’ve seen that many of my acquaintances at Baylor feel this same way. It fills me with so much hope to know that there are Christians who practice with compassion the Gospel of Love, embodied by Jesus’ mandate in Matthew 22 to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

I was only able to overcome my shame once I understood love. And I could only understand love when I was able to accept the truth of who I was. Some of my closest friends came from the Baptist institutions I was a part of. I associated those institutions’ intolerance for homosexuality with their individual incapacity to accept me as a gay woman.

I was only able to overcome my shame once I understood love.

When I came out to those friends, though, they loved me well. It wasn’t easy. But I suddenly found I had a community. A real, actual, valid community to whom I finally opened up. When I fell in love with a girl for the first time, my friends from Baylor were there listening. When that girl didn’t love me back, they came together and helped me make a collaborative “moving on” playlist on Spotify. It seems simple, but there was no higher form of love and support to me in that moment than sending me music meant to heal.

Coming out to my family is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do in my life. It wasn’t easy. It still isn’t. But when it happened, my mom quoted Shakespeare to me, holding my hand and saying, “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, nor bends with the remover to remove, oh no! It is an ever fixed mark.”

An ever fixed mark. Love that moves with people, not policies. But, the human sexuality statement at Baylor is the governing principle behind their decisions to exclude queer people from campus life. It promotes exclusion, and it prevents visibility.

Visibility. Being seen. Is there anything more important at a Christian institution? There shouldn’t be. What Jesus did so radically was see those who were on the outskirts of society. Those that the Pharisees and Sadducees (the religious powers) tried to keep in the periphery. When gentiles came up to Jesus, asking to be healed, did he turn them away because they weren’t Jewish, as the Pharisees may have done? No. They asked for help and they received it.

You can’t tell someone they aren’t good enough, aren’t godly enough, and call that love. You can’t allow a group of students to invite a hateful speaker on to campus, a speaker who is specifically hateful to a group of people you refuse to give official community status to, and call that love. You can’t prioritize your politics over your compassion, your funding over your empathy, your rules over their needs, and call that love.

Without love, Christianity is meaningless.

Baylor Committed to Applying Current LGBTQ Policy

Ken Camp | The Baptist Standard | May 17, 2019

WACO—While some Baylor University donors and alumni publicly have urged the school to recognize an LGBTQ student organization, the university’s board of regents took no action regarding a policy change.

Gamma Alpha Upsilon—formerly the Sexual Identity Forum—applied to be chartered as an official student group at Baylor. The university’s statement on human sexuality includes the expectation that Baylor students will not participate in “advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

‘Love and care’ for all students

In response to a question at a news conference immediately following the regents’ May 17 meeting, President Linda Livingstone emphasized Baylor’s desire to “love and care” for all students, while at the same time continuing to “to make decisions consistent with our vision and our existing policies.”

“It came up in a couple of our committee meetings as we talked—particularly student life, because this is really a student life issue in terms of how we support and care for our students, and certainly our students in the LGBTQ community,” Livingstone said.

“In the context of that, we really talked about how we love and care for all our students, to ensure that they have a healthy and safe and nurturing learning environment so they can be successful educationally in that process.”

At the same time, Livingstone noted Baylor has “existing policies in place that continue to be the policies that we apply when we make decisions about student groups.”

“We will continue to apply those (policies) consistently with how we have in the past and in the context of making sure that we really are fulfilling our Christian mission and loving and supporting our students in appropriate ways,” she said.

Baylor’s statement on human sexuality says: “Baylor University welcomes all students into a safe and supportive environment in which to discuss and learn about a variety of issues, including those of human sexuality. The university affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God. Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual acts outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

The university’s student conduct policy states that Baylor “expects that each Baylor student will conduct himself or herself in accordance with Christian principles as commonly perceived by Texas Baptists.”

Online open letters

About 3,000 individuals signed an online open letter in recent weeks asking Baylor to “reconsider its exclusion of student organizations that are designed to provide a community for individuals in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and allied community.”

The letter encourages Baylor administrators to make changes so the university will not “look back in a few years and realize that we were on the wrong side of an issue of basic compassion and human dignity.”

Signers include major donors, former regents, retired faculty and current faculty including Jackie Baugh Moore, Barbara ‘Babs’ Baugh, Ray Perryman, Oswin “Os” Chrisman, Robert Baird, Blake Burleson, Robert Darden, Preston Dyer and former Congressman Chet Edwards.

In response, another group posted its own online petition titled “Save Baylor Traditions,” that urges the university to “stand strong and refuse to abdicate the traditional Christian values for which it has historically stood.”

Disagreement noted

George Mason, senior pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, wrote an open letter to Livingstone published in the Dallas Morning News, urging Baylor “to take the small yet significant step of granting LGBTQ student groups official status on campus.”

“The step is small, because the school would not be taking an affirming stance on a matter that continues to be contested among Christians of goodwill,” Mason wrote. “It would be significant, because it would signal Baylor’s commitment to welcome and serve all students equally by providing safe space for LGBTQ students to support one another as they pursue their education and discover more about themselves.”

Baylor Provost Emeritus Donald Schmeltekopf sent a letter to the board of regents on May 6 calling on the governing board to “help make Baylor unambiguously Christian in word and deed alike” by retaining its “historic stance on Christian sexuality.”

Schmeltekopf, former provost and vice president for academic affairs, urged the university to maintain a policy “biblically grounded and in full accord with two millennia of clear Christian teaching: We approve no other sexual practices than lifelong celibacy among singles and lifelong fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman.”

It’s no surprise that the issue has generated significant public and private debate, Livingstone noted.

“Obviously, there is going to be a lot of robust discussion around this topic. And that’s what universities are about—it’s bringing people together, talking about issues that really matter and learning from each other,” she said.

“And in the context of this, we have a lot of people who love Baylor and love our students that care deeply about this issue from a variety of perspectives. We will continue to work with them as we continue to make decisions consistent with our vision and our existing policies.”

Regents approve budget, expenditures

During their spring meeting, Baylor’s board of regents approved a $698.4 million operating budget, $4.1 million for the first phase of a planned renovation of the Tidwell Bible Building and $1.815 million for regulatory corrective action along the Brazos Riverwalk near the university’s athletic complex.

The 2019-20 operating budget, which takes effect June 1, includes an additional $13.4 million for both need-based and merit-based scholarships and graduate assistantships.

Baylor University announced a $15 million lead gift from The Sunderland Foundation of Overland Park, Kan., to help renovate and restore the Tidwell Bible Building. (Baylor University Photo)

Funds approved for the Tidwell Bible Building project include design costs for the renovated building and build-out of space on the fourth floor of the Cashion Academic Center, which will house temporary offices for religion and history faculty during the renovation.

Construction on Tidwell—built in 1954—likely will begin in late 2020, with anticipated reopening in 2022. The renovation is made possible by a $15 million lead gift from the Sunderland Foundation.

The board approved funds for regulatory corrective action to improve and prevent future landfill erosion issues on the south bank of the Brazos.

Baylor’s Highers Athletics complex facilities are built within the borders of a closed and capped Waco city landfill that contains wood, brick and glass from buildings destroyed by the 1953 Waco tornado.

Board elect officers, affirms new regents

Regents elected Jerry Clements, an Austin-based attorney, as chair to succeed Joel Allison of Waco, former Baylor Scott & White Health chief executive officer. Clements is a member of First Baptist Church in Spicewood.

Newly elected vice chairs are Mark Hurd of Redwood Shores, Calif.; Melissa Purdy Mines of Austin; and Randy Lee Pullin of Houston.

The board elected three new at-large regents—Sarah Gahm, senior vice president of Baylor Scott & White Health and a member of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas; William Mearse, retired Accenture resources group operations officer and member of Second Baptist Church in Houston; and Manny Ruiz, president and senior lending officer of TexStar National Bank and member of First Baptist Church in San Antonio.

The board welcomed David Slover, senior vice president and chief strategy officer of HighGround Advisors in Dallas, to a three-year term as alumni-elected regent.

The board approved Mark Petersen of Arlington as the regent nominated by the Baylor Bear Foundation, Randall Umstead from the Baylor School of Music as faculty regent and Malcolm Foley, a doctoral candidate from Rockville, Md., as student regent.

Regents reappointed by the Baptist General Convention of Texas at its 2018 annual meeting and confirmed by the board of regents are Mark Rountree of Dallas and Randy Lee Pullin of Houston.

The board of regents re-elected to three-year terms Shelly Giglio of Atlanta, Ga.; Larry Heard of Houston; and Julie Hermansen Turner of Dallas.