Last week, President Mullen gave a chapel talk about how the Houghton community needs to work together to ensure that all students who attend school here feel at home. Her words are very true; however, I can tell you for certain that we are not currently doing that for queer students on campus. If the Houghton community is to truly take President Mullen’s words to heart, we need to re-evaluate our attitude towards students who are in the LGBTQ community.
Last semester, two other students and I conducted a survey of 185 students on campus for a Social Psychology project. The premise of the project was to address a problem Houghton students face; the problem we chose to address was Houghton students’ poor attitude towards the LGBTQ community.
In order to get a baseline and to see if attitudes toward queer public displays of affection differed from attitudes towards heterosexual public displays of affection, we asked about PDA twice: once at the beginning of the survey for “normal” straight couples and once at the end of the survey for LGBTQ couples. The survey measured how appropriate the subjects felt casual displays of affection were on a scale from one (completely inappropriate) to nine (completely appropriate) and how appropriate subjects felt intimate displays of affection were on the same scale. The data from the question on casual displays of affection showed a mean of 7.7 for straight couples and a mean of 5.6 for LGBTQ couples, which indicated that students generally felt more comfortable with casual displays of affection from straight couples. This trend was also seen in attitudes towards intimate displays of affection from straight couples as opposed to LGBTQ couples: the means for this question were 5.2 and 4, respectively. Overall, the students surveyed felt that public displays of affection were more appropriate coming from heterosexual couples.
When we asked on a scale from one (absolutely not) to nine (absolutely) if students felt that LGBTQ marriages should be legal, the average result was fairly in the middle at 5.5; however, this was leaning toward the affirmative as the mode (most frequent answer) was 9. When we asked on a scale from one (absolutely not) to nine (absolutely) if students felt that transgender and nonbinary people should be allowed to use the bathrooms they prefer, the average result was fairly in the middle at 4.8; however, this was leaning toward the negative as the mode was 1. Furthermore, an astounding 17.8% of the population was either unsure or did not believe that people in the LGBTQ community could be Christian. Further, some people wrote comments about how those who are sinners cannot be Christian or a part of the Church.
Queer students come to Houghton because they have a desire to be a part of a thriving Christian community of learning. They want to find a home in Christ here, but the Houghton community’s current attitude as shown by this research does not fully reflect the love of Jesus or the home President Mullen talked about. Every single one of us has fallen short of the glory of God and even if you believe queer relationships are sinful, you cannot biblically say that the sin of being in the LGBTQ community is somehow worse than any of your own sins. Queer people are a part of the body of Christ just like anyone else here and our attitude towards them should reflect that.
So how can we work on changing this attitude of exclusion and hate toward queer students at Houghton? To those of you who are LGBTQ affirming or accepting, I ask that you be loud and outspoken about your beliefs. To the administration, I want to remind you that you have a lot of influence as authority figures. To all of the Houghton community, I ask that you try to regularly interact with someone who is in the LGBTQ community. Our survey showed that 92.4% of the students surveyed said they knew someone who was queer, but only 69.7% of the population said that they regularly interacted with and talked to people in the LGBTQ community. Talk with them, befriend them, and hear their stories. Above all, let us create a home here. Let us remember that the greatest of these will always be love.
Hope is a sophomore majoring in psychology.