To the Editor:
In 2015 I was president of GUPride, Obergefell v. Hodges was not decided and SAC was debating recognizing Love Saxa. Love Saxa had the same empirically harmful ideas and hosted events hostile to LGBT people. My opposition to their recognition at the time had nothing to do with the then-unrecognized right of gay marriage, nor does it now.
The controversy is framed as campus activists asking a Catholic university to defund a group for holding beliefs consistent with church teaching. This has rightly, if disproportionately, stoked right wing fears of “political correctness” run amok and made victimized darlings out of bigots. While I believe bigotry is inextricably tied to opposition to gay marriage, like it once was to interracial marriage, that belief has not become a consensus merely two years after Obergefell v. Hodges.
This does not let Love Saxa off the hook. Love Saxa may not be hate group because it opposes same sex marriage, but it is a hate group because its mission explicitly denies and denigrates the humanity of LGBT persons, married or otherwise. It does not merely advocate against the right of same sex marriage. It claims to promote the “proper” understanding of sex and gender to preserve sexual “integrity.” It then defines these terms in ways such that no transgender person is “proper” and no gay person has “integrity.”
Love Saxa’s brief history is worse. In 2015 they refused to participate in a dialogue with members of Pride to discuss “authenticity” on the grounds that “natural law” prevented them from recognizing LGBT identities. They sandwich anti-LGBT speakers in between events about other deviancies like porn “addiction” and sexual assault. They have no interest in winning converts in our community as they’ve demonstrated their goals are mutually exclusive with our existence.
This is not about marriage. Do not let Love Saxa claim martyrdom at the hands of a people they’d have erased.
Thomas Lloyd (SFS ’15)