More than 3,000 Baylor alumni, students, faculty, staff, and others with a connection to the private Christian university have signed onto a letter asking the administration to officially sanction LGBTQ groups on campus.
For years, the Baylor powers-that-be have turned down requests from LGBTQ students to form official student groups, even as the university weathered scandals over its mishandling of sexual assaults. The final straw for the letter-signers was the university’s approval of Baylor Young Americans for Freedom, a student group that then invited Matt Walsh, an anti-gay commentator who also believes men are meant to rule women, to speak on campus.
“To allow groups such as Baylor YAF to organize officially and advertise and host events in Baylor spaces, while depriving LGBTQ groups the opportunity to create community and officially enter Baylor’s marketplace of ideas is manifestly unfair,” the letter states.
“I noticed a lot of my gay friends constantly felt unsafe, unwelcome, unwanted at Baylor, and they were some of the most beautiful aspects of Baylor. They were the people who taught me the most about my faith and morality. It really hurt me to see they were hurt in that way.”