A prominent legal advocacy organization has condemned the antagonism of a student group due to the group’s position on traditional marriage.
In a statement obtained by The College Fix, Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, called the hostility directed at the Georgetown student group Love Saxa to be “preposterous.”
Love Saxa has been subject to blistering criticism from student activists and the school’s newspaper due to its open advocacy for traditional, male-female marriage. That stance has led activists to accuse the student organization of promoting “homophobia” and of being a “hate group.”
The controversy resulted in Georgetown’s convening a hearing to determine whether or not Love Saxa will be de-recognized as a student group, a move that would strip the group of various benefits, including access to university funding. The hearing will be held next week.
In his statement, Langhofer pointed out the absurdity of these efforts to smear and delegitimize the group, writing:
Love Saxa’s opponents haven’t called for the dissolution of the LGBTQ Resource Center, for example, even though it holds to views that conflict with Georgetown’s prohibition on groups whose purpose or activities are ‘inconsistent with acceptable conduct at an American university committed to the Roman Catholic moral tradition,’ yet they have targeted Love Saxa for views wholly consistent with the Catholic faith. It’s not enough that many of those who don’t hold to conservative religious or political views are seeking to silence those with whom they disagree on public university campuses and elsewhere in the public square. Now they are even seeking to silence them at private, religious universities, which are unquestionably free to recognize student clubs that adhere to the universities’ own founding values.
Georgetown University, Langhofer writes, “should act consistently with its own Catholic identity and reject any request for Love Saxa to be derecognized.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom has recently fought a multitude of legal fights on behalf of students related to colleges’ unfair treatment of pro-lifers, campus denial of free speech and administrative political bias. This month the group launched a new website for its freedom of speech initiative “dedicated to legal assistance for students whose speech is chilled or squelched…their public universities.”
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