By David French, The National Review.
Gordon College president Michael Lindsay
Last year Gordon College, a Christian school just north of Boston, found itself in the crosshairs of the intolerant “social justice” Left merely because of its Evangelical faith. This week, Gordon prevailed against a dangerous threat and secured an important victory for religious liberty and academic freedom.
The ostensible pretext for the Left’s two minutes hate against Gordon was its president’s decision to sign, in his personal capacity, a letter asking President Obama to include a narrow religious-liberties exemption in his executive order banning sexual-orientation discrimination by federal contractors. The requested exemption was in fact narrower than one that Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren had supported in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) a mere eight months before.
In other words, Gordon president Michael Lindsay was asking for accommodations slightly to the left of Senator Warren. But, as I noted in a National Review print article about the controversy, the arc of leftist social history moves quickly, and it bends toward intolerance. The November 2013 version of Senator Warren was now the definition of bigotry. It was 2014 and time to reject the sins of the past. In the effort to punish Lindsay, the Left turned its attention on Gordon, a bastion of Evangelical education more than a century old in the increasingly secular Northeast. It turns out that Gordon actually holds to Christian orthodoxy on sexuality, asking its students, for example, to refrain from sex until marriage, defining marriage as the union of a man and woman.
For a time, local leftists tripped over each other in their rush to punish the college.
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