Thirty-three self-identified LGBTQ etc. students who are currently attending Christian universities have sued the Department of Education, demanding that all federal funding be withdrawn from those institutions.  This suit is an inevitable sequel to the Obergefell lawsuit, which put the whole non-traditional sexual identity spectrum into the Constitution.  However, it also highlights that Christian institutions should never have gotten entangled with the federal government.

In typically histrionic terms, the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Eugene, Oregon, claims that it's a necessity because the court must "put an end to the U.S. Department of Education's complicity in the abuses and unsafe conditions thousands of LGBTQ+ students endure at hundreds of taxpayer-funded, religious colleges and universities." According to the plaintiffs — all of whom voluntarily attended Christian universities — they're suffering horribly at the schools of their choice.

What's really happening is that these Christian institutions live by Christian values — and one of the core Christian values is that God created man and woman and intended them to be a matched set.  As the old line goes, it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.  And it's certainly not Adam and a human creature who declines to identify as either Steve or Eve but, on different days, will engage in sterilized sexual activity with whatever catches his/her/its fancy.  Moreover, the First Amendment explicitly ensures that Christian institutions have the right to hold these beliefs — beliefs, incidentally, that were the norm when the Founders ratified the Bill of Rights.

The recently filed lawsuit became inevitable when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell.  Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy decided that the Constitution has some unwritten provisions about everyone's right to be loved and accepted.  Add in a few penumbras and emanations, and — bada-bing, bada-boom — LGBTQ etc. relationships (and, by extension, LGBTQ etc. identities) are constitutionally sanctioned.

At the time they were pressing for same-sex "marriage," leftists promised that a favorable decision would not see them attacking religious institutions, either to force the institutions to perform gay "marriages" or to close them for refusing to do so.  After all, they said, they never sued the Catholic Church over abortions.

There were two problems with that argument.  First, the Catholic Church doesn't commit abortions.  It simply preaches that they're murder, which doesn't sit well with abortion's supporters.  Second, when Obamacare came along, the federal government harassed religious institutions like crazy because those institutions, whether religious or secular, did not want to commit abortions by proxy, which is what they'd do if they offered health insurance policies funding abortions.

It was obvious from the get-go that the Supreme Court's conclusion that specific gay rights exist in the Constitution was always going to take the leftists' never-ending attack against Judeo-Christian values to a whole new level.  Poor Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker, has been harassed relentlessly because the LGBTQ etc. crowd insists that he bake them cakes celebrating their alternative lifestyles.  The fact that there are myriad other bakeries from which to choose (including some nice Muslim ones, I've heard) is irrelevant.  Phillips will be made to bend a knee to the LGBT crowd.

In the same way, these thirty-three students knowingly attended Christian colleges that emphasize their traditional, biblical values.  Nevertheless, they're complaining because they don't like those same values.  You will be made to bow.  (As a reminder, the Maccabees refused to bow, and, eventually, although at great cost, they won.)

But there's one more point to be made here: he who pays the piper calls the tune.  If these Christian institutions made themselves dependent on federal money, they're going to be stuck with whatever the judicial system decides for them.

The better argument regarding federal monies should come from taxpayers.  Taxpayers need to start insisting that all federal funds get withdrawn from all colleges and universities.  To the extent these institutions teach values antithetical to the values of at least half of American taxpayers, taxpayers shouldn't have to fund them, just as they shouldn't be forced to fund hard-left PBS and NPR.

With leftists constantly babbling about a Great Reset, maybe it's time for conservatives to come up with a Greater Reset.  The conservative version would include pulling federal funds from colleges and universities, leaving them to compete in the free market; ending private and government harassment of traditional religious organizations; securing our border so we have a sovereign country; making masks voluntary across America; lowering taxes on the middle class; requiring voter ID but rejecting vaccine passports; and much more.

I like it.  A Greater Reset...it sounds good, doesn't it?

Image: Liberty University's Student Union by Billy Hathorn.  CC BY-SA 3.0.

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