Freshmen Orientation At Penn State Is A Cause For Concern For Christian Parents – Gary L. Morella

Students are being manipulated at Penn State by confusing "perversity" with "diversity." This is the result of President Graham Spanier's social engineering agenda where, through the Vice-Provost’s Office for Educational Equity, being inclined to unnatural sex acts is presented to PSU students as a cause for pride, an alternative lifestyle, contrary to almost unanimous condemnation across a broad spectrum of faith traditions from time immemorial. It's not a question of "tolerance" anymore, but rather a "demand" for compromising your faith, something that is against the law if "freedom of religion" still has meaning in this country. Graham Spanier needs to be reminded that his incoming freshmen during orientation, and his student body as a whole, are not obliged to "tolerate" the promotion of sin. To do so is coercion in the strongest sense of the word. This is happening at a university that receives a significant amount of annual public funding from Harrisburg, a university that prides itself on "freedom of speech", which seems to include all speech except that of those who disagree with its policies for reasons of faith.

In a memorandum to the Penn State faculty dated August 21, 2001, President Spanier said, "I am enclosing a summary of some key University Park resources available to students. Please do not hesitate to make referrals." Included in this referral list was the

Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender Resource Room, 328 Grange, 863-1248 www.lions.psu.edu/lgbt.

The room provides confidential support and information to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Penn Staters.

So with a stroke of the pen President Spanier has given his unqualified support to the official promotion of sexual deviancy at his university equating it with the Center for Adult Learner Services, Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs, Student and Family Services, Disability Services Office for Students, Division of Undergraduate Studies, Student Aid Office, University Health Services, and Veterans Programs, to name a few of the other University Park resources getting equal billing with the promotion of homosexuality. It's one thing to allow radical student groups a voice under the most liberal of ACLU guidelines; it's something else to embrace such groups as official university policy contrary to the beliefs of a large number of taxpaying residents of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania who find themselves being forced to support behavior that their faith traditions hold in anathema.

The Penn State student paper, The Collegian, reported that "that tremendous paragon of virtue," Jesse Jackson, who recently proved that he's just as shameless as his hero, William Jefferson Clinton, would be coming to campus. Jackson should be making the distinction between "invidious" discrimination, which everyone should be against, and "just" discrimination between right and wrong, which everyone should be for, in making it clear to PSU students that the civil rights movement has been hijacked by a group of radicals whose demand for unity to include their particular agenda allows for no dissent whatsoever. Somehow, I doubt that this will occur. It was also reported that a parent of Matthew Shepard would be speaking on campus.

It's very sad what happened to Matthew Shepard, something that should not happen to any creation of God. It's equally sad what happened to a young boy in Arkansas, Jesse Dirkhising, who was brutally sodomized, tortured, and killed by homosexuals. Equal justice under the law applies in both cases. Evidently, equal reporting doesn't, by the media's own admission, as Shepard has been made a homosexual icon while Dirkhising has been forgotten.