Christian college’s accreditation threatened over adherence to Christian moral values

If you are a Christian, then you take Bible as an authority in sexual matters. That means no sex before marriage. And no sex outside marriage. Period.

Check out this article from Boston Business Journal.

Excerpt:

The regional body that accredits colleges and universities has given Gordon College a year to report back about a campus policy on homosexuality, one that may be in violation of accreditation standards.

The higher education commission of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges met last week and “considered whether Gordon College’s traditional inclusion of ‘homosexual practice’ as a forbidden activity” runs afoul of the commission’s standards for accreditation, according to a joint statement from NEASC and Gordon College.

The commission asked Gordon College to submit a report next September. The report should describe the process by which the college has approached its review of the policy “to ensure that the College’s policies and procedures are non-discriminatory,” the statement said.

So it doesn’t matter to the commission what they teach in the classroom, it just matters that they toe the line on secular sexual ethics. Accreditation doesn’t mean having academic standards, it means that your moral beliefs have to match those of the commission.

If you want to contact the four women (1 president, 3 vice presidents) who lead the commission, their contact information is here. I’m sure that these four women believe that they are acting out of compassion and tolerance in order to promote diversity, but from my perspective, I just see it is as another case of secularists trying to force their moral views on Christians by threats and coercion.

Previously, Gordon College was in the news for asking for an exemption from Obamacare, which forces Christians to subsidize the cost of drugs that cause abortions.

From Campus Reform.

Excerpt:

The town of Salem, Mass., has pitted itself against Gordon College after the president of the private Christian school added his name to a public letter to President Obama asking for a religious exemption from a planned federal mandate.

The expected executive order would force any organization receiving federal funds, including religiously based organizations, to hire people whose sexual conduct may not fall in line with their beliefs. Gordon says the mandate would be an “infringement on religious liberty” and “the rights of faith-based institutions to establish a set of standards and expectations for their community.”

Gordon’s statement of faith and conduct defines marriage as the “lifelong one-flesh union of one man and one woman.” It also clarifies that the school is against “homosexual acts,” not “same-sex orientation,” and claims that it expects its students and faculty to “refrain from any sexual intercourse—heterosexual or homosexual; premarital or extramarital—outside of the marriage covenant.”

“Signing the letter was in keeping with our decades-old conviction that, as an explicitly Christian institution, Gordon should set the conduct expectations for members of our community,” Gordon College President Michael Lindsay said in a statement. “Nothing has changed in our position.”

[…]It was Lindsay’s signature that prompted Salem Mayor Kimberly Driscoll to publicly chastise the school, calling the small Christian college’s longstanding policies of expressly forbidding homosexual practices “offensive” in a statement released by the city. Driscoll went on to say that the city was revoking its contract with the college over the management of the city’s Old Town Hall facility.

“While I respect your rights to embed religious values on a private college campus, religious freedom does not afford you the right to impose those beliefs upon others and cannot be extended into a publicly owned facility or any management contract or a publicly owned facility, like Old Town Hall,” she said.

This Obamacare mandate is one of the cases that shows why I always urge Christians to vote for smaller and smaller government. The more money stays in our hands, the more freedom we have to run our own lives. The more money we transfer to people in secular governments, the more power they have to intrude into our lives and force their beliefs on us. Part and parcel of the rejection of God as an authority figure is the desire to get the approval of everyone else around you for acting immorally and selfishly. When people reject God, they feel guilty, and it causes them to want to surround themselves with people who tell them that they are actually doing the right thing by doing the wrong thing. But no amount of celebration of their selfishness is enough, and that’s why the secular left is so much in favor of taxpayer-funded abortion, restricting disagreement with homosexuality and so on.

One way to stop their desire to get us to celebrate and affirm their immorality is to cut off the flow of money from families and job creators to the secular government. They should be getting no more of what we make than they need to perform their jobs – e.g., building roads, maintaining armed forces, etc. The more we can privatize things like education, health care, etc., the more free we will be. That could go as far as privatizing or even abolishing entire government departments.