Last week I wrote to you about the most recent attack on Gordon College and the unrelenting push of the LGBTQ agenda into Christian academia.  As I was discussing this with a fellow alumnus, he remarked that if Gordon were forced to give up its unique Christian character, it would be just one more liberal arts school trying to compete in New England.  Perhaps tellingly, what many consider the pinnacle of New England secular academia, Harvard College, gave an example last week of just where an abandonment of Christian faith and morality will lead.  The Harvard office of BGLTQ Student Life issued a flyer in response to the Free Speech Bus’ visit to Cambridge a few weeks ago.  The Free Speech bus, you may remember, simply had the language “It’s biology: Girls are girls and always will be.  Boys are boys and always will be.”  These simple truths, founded as much in science as scripture, were labeled “Transphobic misinformation,” by Harvard.  You can see the whole flyer here, but it is worth repeating the warning they issued:

  harvard bgltq

“Transphobic misinformation is a form of systemic violence.  Fixed binaries and biological essentialism, manifest in gendered language, misgendering someone, and the policing of trans bodies, threaten the lives of trans people.” 

Let me just briefly unpack that, because its implications are stunning:

  • When my son was born and the doctor exclaimed, “It’s a boy!” that is what Harvard views as “gendered language” based on the “fixed binaries” of male and female.  It would also be an example of “biological essentialism,” in that ‘just because’ our son had male organs, my wife and I would treat him as a boy.
  • I am currently working with a public school teacher who is not comfortable referring to a gender-confused freshman girl as a “boy,” and is therefore worried that he might lose his job if he is accused of “misgendering” that student.
  • The 2016 Bathroom and Locker Room Law has already made it a crime for a parent to prevent a man from entering the women’s locker room if their child or loved one is inside because that would constitute “the policing of trans bodies.”

It would be easy to dismiss this language (not to mention the mindboggling list of BGLTQ terminology on Harvard’s website), but the flyer’s claim that a Biblical or even biological understanding of sex is “systemic violence” and “threaten[s] the lives of trans people,” makes it clear that any deviation from this new pansexual orthodoxy will not be tolerated.  Sadly, this is what is being taught to many of our nation’s future leaders.  More than ever, we need to defend schools like Gordon College as a place for people of faith and students who still want to pursue Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae.

For our families,