Reflections on the Pulse Massacre Three Years Later

Today - June 12 - is the third anniversary of the massacre at Pulse, and LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida.  Like so many in the LGBT community, I was stunned and sickened by the huge loss of life - Pulse is the largest deadly attack on LGBT individuals in American history.  Moreover, the massacre was a wake up call to many in the community that it is still dangerous, some times deadly so, to be LGBT in America.  In the intervening three years, things have decidedly not gotten better in many parts of the USA.  The Trump/Pence regime continues to wage war against LGBT rights and anti-gay Christofascist extremists hold sway at the White House.  Shockingly, today in Orlando an anti-gay pastor who condones the murder of gays announced a "make America straight rally" where pastors who cheer the execution of gays will rally in the very same  community where LGBTQ people were massacred three years ago.  Some take umbrage at my use of the term "Christofascists" yet in a telling coincidence, Iran's foreign minister defended that country's execution of gays in language nearly identical to that used by American Christofascists, including those announcing the horrible rally in Orlando: 

“Our society has moral principles,” . . . “And we live according to these principles. These are moral principles concerning the behavior of people in general. And that means that the law is respected and the law is obeyed.”

Make no mistake, the mindset is the same among this Christofascists and Islamic extremists in Iran. Hatred of others and a desperate clinging to antiquated writings by ignorant authors (in the case of the Koran, I would argue a mentally ill author) are the common thread. 

A piece in The Advocate reminds us of the horrors that occurred three years ago.  Here are highlights:

I remember waking up that morning at 7 am and reading the headline “20 DEAD” in a shooting that had ended just one hour and 46 minutes earlier. Regrettably, I remember accepting that 20 deaths was a “normal” number for our world, that 20 was a somehow understandable figure — a calculable loss that tracked with casualty statistics of other shootings at the time. Cold numbers.

But I lost it when the Orlando Police Chief revised his estimation from “not 20 but 50.” Fifty. Could you imagine that? Fifty people just like me.

Many other numbers didn’t make it into mainstream news reports. If these other facts and figures had made national headlines, we might all think about Pulse differently. For example, 90 percent of the victims were Latino, of whom a full 50 percent were Puerto Rican. Four Dominicans and three Mexicans were also murdered, and three Colombians were critically injured in this attack. Where were these numbers when we needed to feel them, when we needed to match them to the images we were seeing?

With 49 murdered in a three-hour timespan, Pulse remains the single deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ people and their allies ever committed.

And yet, queer people of color are 1.82 times more likely to experience physical violence than queer white people. We make up only about 42 percent of the LGBTQ community, and yet, a full 73 percent of all LGBTQ homicides are committed against us. Ignoring these numbers is killing us.  These are the numbers we needed to see then, and we still do now.

Three years after Pulse, I want to remember the aerial footage of 10,000 Floridians lined up in the sweltering streets of Orlando, fanning off beads of sweat in the scorching summer sun as they waited to offer blood — their own biologies — to the victims of the night before. The temperature that day peaked at 90˚F, with a heat index pushing toward 100˚F, and yet the endless line of blood donors remained in place long after the sun had set. Staff at OneBlood’s main office kept their facility open until 3:00 a.m. and still had to turn donors away. These are the innumerable heroes I choose to remember. I want to remember the numbers that reveal unmatched heroism that night. I recall the story of Akyra Murray, the young woman who initially escaped the chaos but, who, at only 18 years of age, made the courageous decision to reenter the scene in search of her friend. Akyra found her friend, but she never made it out herself. She had just graduated high school ranked third in her class.

I want to remember Imran Yousef, the former Marine who, at 24 years of age, tore open a patio fence and helped an estimated 70 people escape the gunshots. I want to remember the unnamed hero who died blocking bullets from at least two survivors behind him. I want to remember Brenda Marquez McCool, a mother of 11 children who loved her son so much she died saving him.

I want to remember the 5,300 pints of blood donated in central Florida on June 12 alone and the 28,000 pints donated throughout the week. And in one victim’s particular case, rather than hate the individual who caused his pain, I want to remember the surgical team and the 214 donors whose blood helped save his life.

As the piece underscores, there are many, many good Americans.  But, the unifying thread for so many who are evil is racism and religious based homophobia - homophobia that continues to be fanned from pulpits across the nation and from the White House.  Religion - especially fundamentalist religion - remains an evil and curse on humanity.

George H.W. Bush: Failing on HIV/AIDS and Enabling the "Religious Right"

George H.W. Bush with Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Last week the media engaged in an orgy of overkill in the coverage of the funeral of George H.W. Bush which at times seemed more like a royal funeral than that of an American politician.  Yes, compared to the current occupant of the White House, Bush 41 looks almost saintly, but in their rush to gush over Bush, many in the media completely ignored Bush's failings and the lives harmed and the political damage done to the nation.  One huge failing was on Bush's policies during the HIV/AIDS crisis, first under Reagan and then later under his own administration.  The second major failing (which dovetails with the first) was his enabling the rise of the perversely labeled "Religious Right" and its ultimate takeover of the Republican Party.  Learning from history requires that both good and bad be remembered so that previous errors do not repeat themselves. This was utterly lacking in most of the funeral coverage.  First a piece in Huffington Post looks at Bush's failure to those with HIV/AIDS.  Here are excerpts:

It’s no surprise that after the death of former president George H.W. Bush we’re seeing media pundits, advocates and popular historians promote a rosy view of his tenure as president. In the era of Donald Trump, there’s a tendency to portray every Republican leader of the past in a nostalgic, sugar-coated way. I saw a tweet from Yahoo News with a quote from the well-known historian Jon Meacham, describing Bush as a man who “believed that he was not a Republican president — he was a president,” noting that “there’s something very old-fashioned about that.” Perhaps that was what Bush “believed,” but it was far from the truth. Bush was as captive to the evangelical right on social issues — and thus a decidedly Republican president — as was his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who cultivated religious conservatives as a potent political force and bowed to their anti-LGBTQ agenda as the AIDS epidemic mushroomed in the 1980s.  Reagan’s history of callously ignoring the epidemic while thousands died is well-documented. Bush, at the outset of his term, promised a “kinder, gentler” presidency than the man he’d served under as vice president. He even gave a speech on the AIDS epidemic in 1990, which was long on compassion but short on strategy and commitment to funding. During the speech, in fact, Urvashi Vaid, an invited guest and then the executive director of the prominent National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, now the National LGBTQ Task Force, took the unprecedented and heroic act of standing up and holding a sign, “Talk Is Cheap. AIDS Funding Is Not.” 

Bush, in the end, bowed to the same extremists Reagan did when it came to AIDS and LGBTQ rights. As The Washington Post noted, Bush allowed evangelicals to mature as a movement within the GOP after Reagan brought them in, rather than pushing back.

[I]t took years of work by the indefatigable Democrats Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Henry Waxman, and was too little, too late. By that point, nearly 10 years into the epidemic, 150,000 cases of people with HIV had been reported in the U.S., and 100,000 people had died due to AIDS.

Infamously, Bush had said in a television interview that if he had a grandchild who was gay he would “love” the child but would tell the child he wasn’t normal. And like Reagan, he stocked his Cabinet with anti-gay zealots. Health Secretary Louis Sullivan, also protested by ACT UP for his terrible response to HIV, joined forces with evangelical leaders to cover up a government-funded study on teen suicide that found LGBTQ teens were at much higher risk.  

And after Buchanan, who Bush offered a prime slot at the Republican National Convention in Houston, gave his infamous “culture war” speech, declaring there is a “religious war” in this country, and attacking, among others, the “militant homosexual rights movement,” Bush refused to denounce the speech and instead publicly denounced same-sex marriage, which was nowhere near a reality at the time. 

If Bush had come into office with perhaps a vague ambition that he might move away from the harsh Reagan years, with its religious morality crusade, he left the presidency having paved the way for his own son’s even more anti-LGBTQ administration, firmly ensconcing religious conservative power within the Republican party.  And that, of course, is the same party that now proudly claims Donald Trump as its leader.

As this above quote notes, the Washington Post looked at Bush's role in cementing the rise of Christofascists within the GOP - the same GOP now dominated by hate-filled Christofascists and white supremacists.  Here are article excerpts:

Unlike his son George W. Bush, the elder Bush, a lifelong Episcopalian, was less known for his religious faith. He was certainly not thought of as a champion of the religious right, the powerful political movement most associated with his predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

Yet it was Bush, the moderate establishment Republican whose family helped found Planned Parenthood, who secured the religious right’s permanent place in American politics. While historians largely credit Reagan’s presidency with helping religious conservatives move from the shadows of American public life into its spotlight, it was the Bush presidency, particularly its disappointments and defeat, that entrenched the religious right as the center of the Republican Party and guaranteed its ongoing influence.

Shortly after Reagan’s win in 1980, the conservative activist and key architect of the religious right Paul Weyrich told the incoming vice president that he better become a stronger advocate against abortion and for school prayer once in office. “I am not intimidated by those who suggest I better hew the line,” Bush shot back. “Hell with them.” Political reality, however, soon curtailed Bush’s independent streak. . . . . [Bush] They also made clear to Bush his need to realign his positions with the conservative wing of the party, which was ascendant, in part because of the rise of cultural issues that were scrambling the party coalitions. At the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, 300 of the 2,200 delegates belonged to the Christian Coalition, and more than 40 percent of the delegates identified as evangelical Christians. With that presence, the GOP’s platform committee produced one of its most conservative platforms ever, with absolutist positions against abortion and homosexuality. While Bush never fully embraced the religious right, he did cater to it from time to time, understanding how essential members were to his political fortunes. His choice of the conservative evangelical Dan Quayle as his vice president and his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court were both intended to appease religious conservatives. . . .  But Bush’s strategic courting of the religious right also laid the groundwork for its eventual takeover of the party.

When Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992, critics pointed to the tent revival feel of the Houston convention as the reason that moderate and independent voters had fled the GOP. But for the religious right, the defeat was a victory of sorts. . . . . And they ambitiously planned to recruit more conservative candidates for office and bury the moderate wing of the party by continuing to build their control of the GOP from within.

By 1994, a study found that the religious right had become “dominant” or “substantial” in 21 of the GOP’s state parties. Two years later at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, Christian Coalition members made up more than half of the convention’s delegates.

The Republican Attack on Feeding the Hungry

If Republicans succeed in their effort to provide massive tax cuts to the very wealthy and huge corporations, not only will the federal deficit explode, but the GOP will push for severe cuts in social programs for the poor, spending on public education, infrastructure and a host of other programs  that benefit the majority of Americans.  One of the programs the Congressional Republicans salivate over cutting is the Food Stamp program which helps feed poor children and the impoverished elderly.  It goes without saying that the majority of Christofascists support such cuts - never mind the Gospel message of feeding the hungry - because in their minds those receiving aid from the program are "other" - non-whites, especially blacks, and others targeted for hatred by the "godly folks."    A piece in The Atlantic looks at this ugly agenda that needs to be blocked.  Here are article highlights:

The end of September marked the 40th anniversary of the Food Stamp Act, the program that institutionalized the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Its passage was a model of how to make constructive and important legislation, finding common ground by making tradeoffs across all the usual boundaries. In this case, the key players included George McGovern and Bob Dole, Tom Foley and Shirley Chisholm, among others. 

The McGovern-Dole alliance was a striking one. When I came to Washington in 1969-70, I witnessed the near-nuclear conflict between the two men. . . . . But the two men built a different relationship around the issue of food. McGovern cared deeply about hunger in America. Dole cared deeply about the plight of farmers, who were whipsawed by the commodity markets and prices that sank when there was too much surplus food. That was the basis for a partnership that turned into a legendary friendship spanning four decades, until McGovern’s death in 2012. They used the relationship, and their overlapping interests, to build the broad coalition for the Food Stamp Act, . . . SNAP has been an enormous success story, feeding hungry, poor people. Forget the outrageous anecdotes about food stamp recipients feasting on lobster; consider instead a story I wrote about when I last addressed this issue four years ago, from a column by Katy Waldman in Slate, based on a conversation she had with Debra, a single mother in Washington whose food stamp allotment had been cut from $203 a month to $130. This is what Debra said about getting by on $203 a month:

It’s me and my daughter at home. She’s 21. It was bad enough before the cuts. We were eating lunch meat all week, and we only had enough for a can of vegetables a day. Divide $203 by 30 days, and then by three meals, and then halve it for each person. It’s not a lot.

According to Feeding America, 42 million Americans suffer from what the experts call food insecurity—for many, it is simply hunger, period; for others, it is like Debra, rarely if ever getting a full and nutritious meal, often finding near the end of the month that there is nothing left to buy food until the next allotment of food stamps, and perhaps getting by with food banks. According to the Department of Agriculture, 80 percent of SNAP benefits are used within the first half of the month. The consequences of food insecurity are bad; trouble concentrating, more vulnerable to illness. Another longitudinal study found that poor children with access to SNAP benefits, years later had lower rates of heart disease and obesity, along with better high school performance, than kids who did not. Leaving people hungry hurts not just them, but the entire society, adding to health costs and reducing productivity. 81 percent of SNAP benefits go to those who are working or to those we do not expect to work—children, the elderly, the disabled. [Y]et again, Republicans, including the Trump administration, are going after SNAP with a meat ax. President Trump’s budget calls for a cut of more than 25 percent over five years, massively shifting the burden to states, cutting eligibility, and hammering the benefits now going to millions of children, elderly and the disabled. Even as they shift the burden to states that are not prepared to jack up their own budgets, the president and his budget crew want to allow the states to pare basic benefits way below a marginally healthy diet that will make Debra’s situation look great by comparison. For kids, we also have the school lunch program—from which Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue wants to remove the nutrition requirements for healthy food put in place at the urging of Michelle Obama. There is Meals on Wheels for seniors—and the Trump budget blows up community block grants that provide a sizable share of the funding for that program. So if Trump, his Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, and congressional Republicans get their way, the hungry will grow a lot more hungry and a lot less healthy. [T]his is a time for all of us to reflect on what kind of society we want to live in. Let’s keep in mind Hubert Humphrey’s eloquent appeal: The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Our government met that test 40 years ago. We are on the verge of failing it, miserably, now.

The Religious Right’s Suicidal Gay Obsession

Survey after survey has shown that Millennials are leaving religion in record numbers and by some accounts those who are religiously unaffiliated range between a third and 40% of that demographic. The same surveys also have revealed that the most significant factor in the decision to walk away from religion was fundamentalist and evangelical Christians' anti-gay hatred and bigotry - followed by their hypocrisy and nastiness in general.   Indeed, the latest PRRI survey  cited in a recent post shows that every Christian denomination is losing membership, including evangelical ones and the Southern Baptists.  Among evangelicals, only 1 in 10 is under 30 years of age. Driving away the young and the educated (who tend to be Episcopalians, Evangelical Lutherans and some Catholics, if they remain Christian at all) is a sure form of long term suicide.  Playing numbers games like the Catholic Church which keeps one on the membership roster until one affirmatively demands to be removed can mask the attrition from supposed membership strength, but the PRRI report shows the reality of what is happening.  The irony is that a sexually obsessed and repressed minority within Christianity are killing the entire brand.  The self-composed Christofascist myth that those who have walked away will return as the get older and/or have children simply is not happening.  My own grandchildren, for example, are growing up as thoughtful, moral, compassionate individuals with religion playing no role in the lives.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Christofascists road to suicide.  Here are highlights:

At the end of last month, a group of Evangelical theologians, pastors, and leaders put out what they called the Nashville Statement on sexual morality. The first thing to note is that 50 years ago, it would have been regarded as self-evident to most Christians. Money quote: “We affirm that God’s revealed will for all people is chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage. We deny that any affections, desires, or commitments ever justify sexual intercourse before or outside marriage; nor do they justify any form of sexual immorality.” So far, so conventional, especially for Evangelicals.

But you immediately wonder if the statement is going to condemn divorce or contraception or multiple successive marriages or pornography or masturbation or countless other questions of sexual morality that heterosexuals grapple with. And you can search the document for any thoughts on these questions. In fact, it has almost nothing to say to 97 percent of humanity on sexual matters.

What it does instead is condemn the 3 percent. In fact, it does more than condemn the sexual behaviors of gay and transgender people. It erases our self-understanding entirely. Money quote: “We deny that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” It is not just what we do that these Evangelical leaders object to; it is who we are. Our very “self-conception” is a defiance of God’s will. We sure aren’t part of nature, even though scientists have observed variations on the sexual norm in countless other species. We are merely heterosexuals who have chosen to act out our desires in sexually immoral ways. The words gay and homosexual and transgender describe nothing but sin. . . . . At best, we are beset with “psychological conditions” that lead us into sin and Hell.

What Evangelicals cannot seem to accept is the possibility that for the vast majority of humankind, male and female self-conception does indeed come completely naturally, that it is clearly integral to humanity’s reproduction and rearing of the next generation, that the sexes are indeed complementary rather than interchangeable … but that this is not the entire story. A small minority does not quite fit this rubric. . . . . it does mean that God’s creation isn’t just Adam and Eve period.

The reason so many minds have changed on this question is because we know more about our nature than we ever have before. You don’t have to junk all of Christianity to acknowledge that. Gay people, for example, will be the first to insist that male and female exist: It’s just that we are attracted to our own sex and not the other.

For a few generations now, gays and lesbians and transgender people, by coming out, have been telling our stories, and those with open minds and big hearts have heard us. It is one of the great tragedies of many Evangelical and orthodox Christians that they are not interested in listening.

And so in the Nashville Statement, there is no advice to gay or transgender Christians, except to be heterosexual, dammit. They don’t even air the possibility of chaste spiritual friendship as a way for such people to lead lives not beset with loneliness, or sexual repression of a kind no human is truly capable of without profound psychological distortion. There is no mention of love at all . . . All this constant rhetoric of loving us is therefore phony. You can’t love people without respecting them. You can’t welcome people you are simultaneously dehumanizing and writing out of creation.

[T]heir intransigence on this question is killing them. It’s particularly damning when so many of these leaders just endorsed, voted for, and threw their weight behind a man who has married several times, claimed that avoiding STDs was his own version of Vietnam, has humiliated successive wives, has bragged about sexual assault, who talks of his own daughter as a sexual object, and touted the size of his dick in a presidential debate. On all of this, most of these same Evangelicals looked the other way. But gay and transgender Christians? We are living rebukes to God’s natural order.

I believe that for an entire generation, this question is a litmus test for whether Christianity really is about love, and whether the Gospels (which have nothing to say about homosexuality) should even get a hearing. I can date my own niece’s and nephew’s rejection of Christianity to the day the priest urged them to oppose equal rights for their uncle. That’s why Evangelicalism is dying so quickly among the young. The latest PRRI survey shows that only one in ten Evangelicals are now under 30. It is no accident . . . . This is what the signers of the Nashville Statement do not quite grasp. They just signed one of the longest suicide notes in history. Because what they’re saying is not merely callous. It is manifestly untrue.

Some readers - most comment anonymously, of course - take me to task for lumping all Christians together when I say that Christianity needs to be a dead religion.  Sadly, rather than continually, loudly and publicly condemn the hate merchants within Christianity and the toxicity of evangelical Christianity in particular, its easier for these individuals to attack those who point out what they prefer to close their eyes to and ignore.  When Christianity dies, it will be because of critics like me, but rather those who could have opposed the hate merchants chose not to do so. 

Is Trump Opening the Door to an Anti-LGBT Backlash?

Previous posts have looked at the anti-gay animus held by many of Der Fuhrer's cabinet nominees, in particular Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos.  And then there is Mike Pence, a virulent homophobe with a document ed record as an enemy of LGBT rights.  With LGBT rights having been scrubbed from the White House and Department of Labor websites within minutes of Trump's swearing in, the question now is whether Trump is intentionally opening the door to an anti-LGBT backlash. If so, he will be keeping promises made to a who's who of Christofascists that helped swing 81% of the evangelical Christian vote to a man who is the antithesis of true Christian values.  A column in the Washington Post contemplates what lies ahead.  Here are excerpts:

“Love it. We can say Fag again.”

That comment, from “Tired-n-Ariz,” was posted on a CBS news story about the disappearance of the LGBT rights page from WhiteHouse.gov shortly after Donald Trump took the oath of office on Friday.

It’s dispiriting that despite Trump’s campaign promise that he’d be a “better friend” than Hillary Clinton to the LGBT community, Day One of his presidency had a different headline: “Gays erased.” Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court marriage equality case, was deeply disheartened. Trump and the GOP “will pretend that we don’t exist while they work tirelessly to strip away all the gains we’ve made toward being equal citizens of our nation,” he said.

Even worse, news articles that pointed out the disappearance of the page prompted a flood of inflammatory comments like Tired-n-Ariz’s.  It seems that many Trump supporters know they don’t need a filter anymore; they’re now empowered to name-call and deploy slurs once considered unacceptable.

“Saturday Night Live” host Aziz Ansari captured this new zeitgeist in a biting skit . . . . “As soon as Trump won, [these people were] like, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore! …We can be racist again, wooo!’ ” Or anti-LGBT. Or misogynistic. For those folks, Ansari had a message: “Please go back to pretending. You’ve got to go back to pretending.” 

 Michelangelo Signorile, author of “It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality,” sees things in a similar light, telling me that Trump’s “attacks on so-called ‘political correctness’ have given license to people to express their bigotry.”

Indeed, many of those commenting on the CBS news story returned repeatedly to the idea that the drive for LGBT acceptance and equality is a result of “all this politically correct crap,” as “boogerhillbill” posted. 

[T]he right to marry the person you love and take on the rights and responsibilities that come with the marriage contract is not a special right. Nor is the right to create a loving family; the right not to be fired from your job because of your identity; the right to visit your spouse in the hospital and make medical decisions on their behalf when necessary. These are the basic rights that heterosexuals currently enjoy; we don’t want more, but we do we want the same.

 

WhiteHouse.gov is a reflection of the new president’s values, policies and priorities, and the erasure of LGBT issues from the site is a warning to us about our exclusion from his worldview. 

Let me leave you with the words of 21-year-old Elizabeth Hadfield, who lives in Durham, N.C. She told me: “As a trans woman, I am rendered worthless and invisible by those who I make uncomfortable via my very existence. The disappearance of the LGBT page from the White House website is just another attempt to render us invisible.”

As I said, sometimes a webpage is not just a webpage.

Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship USA to Purge Gay-Friendly Staff

We hear the Christofascists constantly rail against Islam and, of course, ISIS.  Yet, but for the level of violence they employ, these same "godly Christians"are just as intolerant and driven by contempt of those who believe differently as are Islamic extremists.  Hatred of others and discrimination against "non-believers" are a common theme and characteristic.  A case in point is Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship USA which has announced that it will purge all staff who do not adhere to the organization's virulent opposition to gay rights and, same sex marriage in particular. Since the organization has chapters on some 667 college campuses, one can only hope that its discriminatory views will lead to loss of university funding and/or qualification for use of college/university facilities.  Time magazine looks at the new jihad against those who support same sex CIVIL marriage.  Here are highlights:

One of the largest evangelical organizations on college campuses nationwide has told its 1,300 staff members they will be fired if they personally support gay marriage or otherwise disagree with its newly detailed positions on sexuality starting on Nov. 11.

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA says that it will start a process for “involuntary terminations” for any staffer who comes forward to disagree with its positions on human sexuality, which holds that any sexual activity outside of a husband and wife is immoral.

“We internally categorize these as involuntary terminations due to misalignment with InterVarsity ministry principles, which is a category we use for people who leave for theological and philosophy of ministry disagreements,” Greg Jao, an InterVarsity vice president and director of campus engagement, told TIME in an email.

InterVarsity has also said that staffers should only share views publicly that are consistent with its positions, though it’s unclear if that means someone could be fired for posting on Facebook, for example. Outlined in an internal 20-page paper, the positions include injunctions against divorce and sex before marriage, though critics say the biggest effect will be among younger staffers who support gay marriage—in essence, making it something of a theological purge.

Bianca Louie, 26, led the InterVarsity campus fellowship at Mills College, a women’s liberal arts school in Oakland and her alma mater. When it became clear several months ago that the policy would go into effect, Louie realized she had to leave, after four years of working with the group. She is not sure what will happen to the outreach she and others worked to create at Mills. “I don’t know how InterVarsity can do ministry on campus with integrity anymore,” she says. “Mills is a women’s college with inclusive trans policies, and higher ed is overall making more efforts to be inclusive and safe for LGBTQ students. … I could see us getting kicked off campus because of this.”

Louie and about ten other InterVarsity staff formed an anonymous Queer Collective earlier this year to organize on behalf of staff, students, and alumni who felt unsafe under the new policy.

InterVarsity has more than 1,000 chapters on 667 college campuses around the country. More than 41,000 students and faculty were actively involved in organization in the last school year, and donations topped $80 million last fiscal year.

In its description of sexual attraction, identity, and behavior, the paper states, “Scripture is very clear that God’s intention for sexual expression is to be between a husband and wife in marriage. Every other sexual practice is outside of God’s plan and therefore is a distortion of God’s loving design for humanity.”

The position paper also outlined theological positions against divorce, sex before marriage, pornography, cohabitation and sexual abuse, but the practical application of the study focused on implications for the LGBTQ community. The July letter states: “We expect that all staff will ‘believe and behave in a manner consonant with our “Theological Summary of Human Sexuality” paper,’ as described by the Code of Conduct.

InterVarsity’s decision reaches beyond just its campus ministry. InterVarsity Press, a division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, is a prominent evangelical publisher that has published bestsellers like J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, John Stott’s Basic Christianity, and many theological commentaries and biblical reference books used at evangelical colleges. “InterVarsity employment policies are for all employees, including employees of InterVarsity Press,” . . .

Evangelicals are increasingly divided over gay marriage, and support is rising, especially in the younger generations. One in four white evangelicals support gay marriage, according to the Pew Research Center, more than double the support from ten years ago, and nearly half of millennial evangelicals favor or strongly favor gay marriage.

The move is also another sign of a trend in evangelical circles for stricter orthodoxy.

For Ginny Prince, 32, the consequences of the new policy are very difficult to discuss. Until last week, she was an assistant area director near Oakland, and had worked for InterVarsity for seven years. She is an LGBTQ ally—and she has a transgender child. Already, she says, her husband has walked away from the faith largely because of how the church has dealt with the LGBTQ community. She knew she had to tell her supervisor she did not support the new policy. “This was very painful for everybody,” Prince says. “I got fired … I sent an email and said, I cannot align, and I think that this policy is discriminatory, and I cannot align. That was it. We cried, we cried really hard my last day.”

As noted, I hope the organization finds itself kicked off of many campuses.  The other irony is that among the under 30 generations, young adults are leaving religion in droves with anti-LGBT bigotry being a commonly cited reason for walking away from Christianity.  This bigoted move will likely accelerate this trend an, with luck, will hasten the death of conservative Christianity in America.