At this writing, 15 April, the Lexington Herald-Leader has for six consecutive days presented on the front page above the fold accounts of the ouster of student Jason Johnson from the University of the Cumberlands, located in Williamsburg, Ky., the reason having to do with his flaunting of his homosexuality by documenting details of his “dating life” on two personal Web-sites. The handbook of the school includes the requirement that the encouragement of or actual participation in homosexual behavior is not allowed and that to violate the requirement disposes a student to expulsion. Johnson, age 20, with apparently the full knowledge of what he was doing vis-à-vis the requirement, automatically disenfranchised himself as a student. On his site, he had already noted his intention to leave the school, but probably not in the way his leaving took place. One can only wonder at his motivation, but it is significant that his family engaged a lawyer immediately, notwithstanding his obvious and self-admitted violation of school regulations.
On the 14th, according to the newspaper, Johnson was in New York doing interviews, probably with the usual suspects in the mainstream media, the purpose being, of course, to ridicule the school and especially those evangelicals of Baptist persuasion. UC receives some funding, a very small percentage of its income, from the Kentucky Baptist Convention, a consortium of churches involving 790,030 members in Kentucky, which channels support from those churches to the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination second only to the Roman Catholic church in size and probably the denomination most hated by the liberal establishment, both governmental and by the so-called mainline churches, which have struggled with the homosexual problem for years and in the process steadily lost members. The school will survive without the Baptist support, but the stand taken is on principles it happens to share with most Baptists….as well as a lot of other people, especially in the voting public.
It’s doubtful that any single event in the paper’s history (including wars and pestilences of every kind) has been covered with this much obvious overkill, a news item that might have made the first page of the state-news section of most city newspapers, and then only once. In today’s issue, on the 15th, the paper devoted a huge segment of the front page and nearly all the news-area of page four to this matter. Buried on page five with a small headline was the fact that two soldiers had been killed in the Iraq War. Enormous sections of both the front pages above the fold and interior pages have been devoted to this matter throughout the six-day period (as well as editorial trashing of the school), the subject of sodomy being more important that actual life-and-death news.
One looks for a reason for this obvious advancing of an agenda designed to destroy, if possible, an institution of higher learning that caters particularly to disadvantaged students in the Appalachian area of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee and awards scholarships that are hard to believe in the process, 95% of the 1,700 students receiving aid almost commensurate with the cost of tuition, on average. The paper is a part of the Knight-Ridder empire that has just been sold, is inordinately liberal, and, as such, could be expected to hate anything it might construe as part of the so-called “religious right.” Therein lies the reason. Johnson means nothing to the paper. He’s merely a tool to be used in the propagation of its effort to discredit the Baptists and all other evangelicals.
How successful will the paper be? Most likely, it has completely misunderstood the public, especially parents sending their offspring to school. The attention the school has received from both the local paper and the TV interviews nationally will comprise an enormous amount of publicity the school could never have concocted otherwise. States have been giving the absolute back of the hand to demands of homosexuals in referendum after referendum in recent years. The citizens of Kentucky, for instance and despite concurring laws already on the books, voted an amendment to the State Constitution only months ago absolutely outlawing marriages between homosexuals, also a way of saying to the homosexual/lesbian community that its demands will not be met. Earlier this week, the governor of Kentucky removed from state-hiring-practices procedures a “special protection” clause for homosexuals, letting the protection of people on the basis of gender and ethnicity do the job. Homosexuals have reacted loudly, considering themselves a category defined by something as obvious as race, when they are just men and women, like everyone else, and should be hired/fired on those bases, not as some sort of special people deserving special treatment.
It should be remembered that neither the churches nor most believers have any argument with homosexuals per se. They are welcome in most churches. It is homosexual behavior that is intolerable. This is not just a biblical matter, though homosexual practices are prodigiously condemned in scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. Indeed, Jesus himself used the episode of the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, actual historical places driven by homosexual populations and destroyed by God, to describe the outlook facing those who did not respond to his ministry. However, those who do not believe the Bible have only to contemplate homosexual practices to be repelled by such behavior. The military, by law, can and does immediately discharge any serviceperson known to practice homosexual behavior. It is an abomination, and the nation that countenances it as normal has only to consider what the nation would become if the small percentage of homosexuals could be exchanged for that of heterosexuals. Imagine a nation probably 98-99 percent homosexual – another Sodom or Gomorrah…and, of course, a veritable hell on earth. Unnatural behavior on a large scale leads to chaos, exploitation of the most vulnerable, and, of course, unspeakable disease.
The protesters will be on the UC campus, it is reported, on Wednesday, 19 April. There are hundreds of institutions of higher learning in this country that do not countenance homosexual behavior, one close to Lexington being Asbury College, a strong nationally respected school with strong connections to the United Methodist Church. The administration at UC has made it plain that it stands on Christian principle. It offers quality education and will continue to be a good school, this affair doing it far more good than harm.
Note: On the seventh day, the 16th, the Herald-Leader left Johnson off the front page and put him in the lead and only editorial, even though the paper had already editorialized Johnson and his self-inflicted predicament earlier. Look out Baptists, the paper means to demonize and de-denominationalize [sic] you.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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