The Community Covenant should not be amended as Luke Lauer proposes in his piece, “LGBQ Inclusion: Community Covenant Amendment.”
Lauer’s proposed change misses the word, “Biblical.” If, to quote Wynn Horton, we want “‘to serve the college’s purpose while maintaining its loyalty to a Christian heritage’,”, then why would we remove the word “Biblical”? What, besides the Bible, should define the “bonds of marriage” for a Christian college?
Moreover, if the change included the word “Biblical”, the Covenant would still implicitly forbid homosexual lifestyles.
The core of “homosexual behavior” is sexual attraction between people of the same sex. “Behavior” implies activity in fulfillment of that attraction. When a newly dating straight couple kisses each other but refrains from sex, they are not breaking Biblical bonds, but they are still acting in partial fulfillment of the sexual attraction between each other. A partial fulfillment of sexual attraction also takes place when two gay men kiss each other. The difference is that the kiss of the same-sex couple cannot find an appropriate ultimate fulfillment in the sexual union of the marital relationship. Homosexual behavior, then, has no proper telos. Thus, the problem for our LGBQ community members trying to reconcile even the partial fulfillment of homosexual sexual desires with Christianity is that such reconciliation is, by any honest reading, biblically impossible (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).
For these reasons, I also disagree with the contention that the wording about which Mr. Lauer complains is truly vague. We can determine from the college’s policy enactments and from the words of Dean Michael Jordan that when the college forbids “homosexual behavior”, it certainly forbids homosexual intercourse. But it also forbids more than that. And rightly so, for other forms of “homosexual behavior” outside of intercourse are also, by logical extension of the Bible’s words, unchristian and unacceptable.
It is indeed unfortunate and problematic if homosexual students feel isolated from their heterosexual peers. However, the way for gay and straight students to be reconciled is not to sever Houghton from biblically-based bans on sinful behavior. That would primarily serve only to sever Houghton from the Christian faith.
-Aaron Rider ‘15
