Lesbian Christian Persecuted at Christian College
Facing being fired for her sexuality, she writes about the details of her experience from her anonymous blog (link removed at her request):
...The VP closed his office door, pulled out one of my receipts that I'd submitted, and asked me to explain it. It was for a book I'd ordered from Amazon, an $11 paperback that I'd used for the article I was revising over the summer, one that's been accepted for publication. He said that HR had flagged the receipt as suspicious and turned it over to him; he took one look at it and said to the HR person, "I will investigate this; please keep this top secret." I don't want to be too specific here, but the book in question is a history - by a real, bona fide, Ph.D.-bearing historian - on a topic related to sexuality; it has a deliberately provocative title but is an absolutely legitimate academic book on a topic that was suggested to me by the editor of the collection in which this article will appear.
Let's be clear. This is exactly the kind of anti-political, cruel misuse of faith that we should be speaking out against from the Progressive Movement. Not only is, here, a Vice President of a college trampling the academic freedom that Christians have always supported as an expression of the free quest for truth, but he is carrying into the political realm the hysteric fear of sexuality that so many Americans suffer from.
Sexuality is a gift from God, and it has to be talked about, openly, in the quest for ethical, social, Christ-centered relationships. We refuse to believe that silencing conversation is the best way to create loving relationships.
We have written here many times that America suffers from a specific, hundred-year problem -- the invention of sexuality as a kind of identity, starting with Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis. Previously there were men and women who did particular things with their bodies, some of which were helpful and some of which weren't. Now we have men and women who understand themselves a certain way relating to their bodies: even Fundamentalist Christians have "drives" and "hormones," they can identify as a "homosexual" or "heterosexual." All of that is new.
The Bible teaches us to make ethical, loving, responsible, service-oriented decisions based on knowledge of the world. We read the Bible not to recreate first-century Palestine with its corrupt Pharisees and insalubrious politics, but to think through how to be responsible towards new identities -- whether the question is new political philosophies or new sexual identities -- as they emerge, and as we try to understand where they came from, what potential for good and for ill they represent, and how we should act accordingly.
A Christian who knows that she's a lesbian, teaching history at a college, is probably the most likely candidate in the world to humbly, seriously explore the meaning of ethics in sexuality from within new forms of identity. She's the best hope of Christians who take seriously the call to figure out how to be ethical and responsible within any form of relationship, and she's the last person in the world that a Christian college should be silencing.
