Illustration By Robert Navarro
Enough is enough. It is time to terminate Southwestern College’s relationship with Point Loma Nazarene University.
PLNU’s history of anti-LGBTQ behavior is not congruent with Southwestern’s stated support for LGBTQ students and employees. For Southwestern to prioritize the rightwing, openly homophobic religious institution over its own community is unbearable and unacceptable.
This divorce is years overdue. Point Loma never left the homophobic America of the 1950s and ‘60s. Institutional discrimination against LGBTQ citizens – like slavery and racism – is supposed to be in our nation’s past (Florida and Texas not withstanding). California, in particular, has denounced homophobia and discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Southwestern College has an enviable reputation as a bastion of multiculturalism and racial diversity. We may be the most diverse college or university in the United States. We have a diverse faculty with diverse backgrounds and rich experiences. Our diversity gives us strength, power and wisdom. Our LGBTQ students and staff are an essential part of who we are. Without them, we are all diminished.
Southwestern is long past the Age of Ignorance where LGBTQ people were expected to denounce or hide who they are. We do not pressure LGBTQ students to “reform” or “convert.” We do not censor their ideas, ban their literature or pull the plug on their films. We do not have special counselors for LGBTQ students to “steer them from sin.” We do not pepper them with self-righteous, candy-coated hate speech like “hate the sin, love the sinner.”
Point Loma Nazarene does all these things and more. Its smug, holier-than-thou attitude toward its own students and staff is vomitous and primitive. A few examples:
• PLNU bans the hiring of out LGBTQ people as faculty or staff.
• The Dean of Theology was fired for supporting an instructor who expressed support for LGBTQ people.
• In 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of same sex couples to marry, PLNU stopped hosting weddings, receptions and vow renewals.
• In 2016 PLNU was named one of America’s worst universities for LGBTQ students by the human rights organization Campus Pride. It remains on the list.
• Southwestern College students who identify as LGBTQ report being mistreated when they transfer to PLNU or attend on-campus classes required to complete Bachelors degrees they started at Southwestern as part of a joint degree program.
This month PLNU blocked a screening of the film “1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture” by Voices of Love, an LGBTQ+ student organization on campus. The documentary argues the case that recent rewrites of Christian scripture fueled anti-LGBTQ behavior in America’s church communities.
PLNU is a private institution and apologists say that gives it the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people. That is a distasteful legal argument for another day. Southwestern College, however, is a public institution funded by state and federal tax money. It is prohibited from discrimination on the basis of race, age, sexual orientation and other human characteristics.
Period.
So why is Southwestern College in a cozy relationship with an institution that engages in open discrimination against LGBTQ members of our community? Why do we have a program that intentionally sends students to a place that violates state and federal anti-discrimination laws? Why is Southwestern College – proudly diverse – in partnership with an institution that engages in behavior banned on our campus?
Southwestern College talks a good game but is guilty of galling lapses in principle. Partnering with a retrograde institution like PLNU is to LGBTQ people like partnering with the Ku Klux Klan would be to Black people or the Minuteman Project is to Latinos. It should be unthinkable.
Our leaders frequently speak of making data-informed decisions. The data is clear. PLNU is an anti-LGBTQ institution.
This partnership needs to end.
Now.
Our hope is that principled colleges and businesses abandon PLNU, forcing it to change. Divestiture and isolation work.
PLNU is a bad place for LGBTQ people. Southwestern College is tarnished by rubbing up against that. Our college needs to stop looking the other way and start pressuring PLNU to join the 21st century. PLNU must begin to treat LGBTQ students and staff with the same rights afforded to all other Americans.
Let’s get on the right side of this situation. We are currently guilty of complicity and hypocrisy. Do we love and support LGBTQ people, or not?
Time to align the rhetoric with action. PLNU must go.
