They do have that right, but one problem with such a response is that neither the Bible nor Jesus solves this situation, for either side, really.
Opinion: Christian Academy of Louisville homework shows indoctrination happening in private schools They have a right, they say-and they are not wrong on this point-to teach their religious commitments. The school system’s defenders point out that they are only what they ever said they were-an evangelical private Christian school with a “biblical” worldview. They note, rightly, that a private school founded as a reaction against desegregation, which Christian Academy of Louisville was, is once again segregating itself from particular minorities. One side decries the abuse of this homework assignment, which primes students for a real-world conversation with real-world effects. The responses have been typical and as polarized as every other issue in our society.
I thought about Matthew Shepard, and the impact of his death on me, recently because of the Christian Academy of Louisville middle-school assignment that asked students to talk a hypothetical gay friend out of their homosexuality in favor of “God’s design” of heterosexuality. How was I raised in a thoroughly loving, Christian home and church context that screamed about how much Jesus loves everybody and how nothing can keep anyone from that love and had been so personally unconcerned about extending that concern to such a vulnerable population? Twenty-four years later, as a 42-year-old man, I look back at that first bit of sympathy that I felt and stand ashamed of the preceding callousness. Whatever he had done, he did not deserve that. It took Matthew Shepard dying a brutal death for me even to start a rethinking process. I grew up in the midst of the AIDS epidemic when homosexuals were dying in droves and I do not ever remember feeling sorry for them, much to my present shame.įor Subscribers: Homophobic homework? For some Christian Academy alums, assignment is par for the course It was 1998 and I was an 18-year-old freshman in college at Bellarmine College.Īlthough I never remember being told or directly taught this, prior to Matthew Shepard, I thought that whatever harassment LGBTQ people (though we did not yet have this term) received, they brought on themselves. He was discovered in a coma eighteen hours later-still tied to the fence post-and eventually succumbed to his injuries at the hospital. The first time I felt sorry for a gay person was when two guys beat Matthew Shepard within an inch of his life while he was tied to a fence post and left him to die in a Wyoming field.