Baylor doubles down on LGBTQ inclusion

OPINION:

Baylor University recently announced the receipt of a $640,000 grant from the Baugh Foundation to pursue “LGBTQ inclusivity” on its campus. Last week, Baylor’s president, Linda A. Livingstone, said she was rescinding the grant. Here is the letter (in part) sent to the Baylor family, as well as the media:

Dear Baylor Family,

I want to provide an important update regarding a recent matter involving a grant awarded to the Center for Church and Community Impact within the [Baylor] School of Social Work. This grant supported … academic research aimed at exploring inclusion and belonging in the church, with a particular focus on LGBTQIA+ individuals in congregational settings.

[Our Dean] and principal investigator … have voluntarily offered to rescind their acceptance of this grant … and return all associated funds to the granting foundation. … I support this decision and agree that this is the appropriate course of action and in the best interests of Baylor University.

We remain committed to providing a loving and caring community for all — including our LGBTQIA+ students. …

Please be assured that Baylor’s institutional beliefs and policies remain unchanged. Our commitment to our Christian mission and our historic Baptist identity continues to guide our approach to academics, student life, and spiritual formation. We affirm the biblical understanding of human sexuality as a gift from God, expressed through purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman.

We recognize that this situation has caused concern and confusion for many within the Baylor Family and among our broader community of churches, partner organizations, and supporters. This has been a learning opportunity for many involved in this situation, and we aim to work alongside our college and school leaders, faculty, and research community, particularly during these challenging times for higher education.

Baylor remains deeply committed to its unique role as a Christian research university — one that encourages rigorous inquiry and thoughtful exploration of complex issues. We will continue to support our faculty and researchers in pursuing meaningful scholarship while ensuring that such work aligns with our institutional processes.

I hope this communication provides clarity into what has been a difficult week for many within the Baylor Family. Thank you for your prayers and continued support for Baylor University.

Sincerely,

Linda A. Livingstone, Ph.D.

President

What is wrong with this letter? Well, frankly, almost everything.

In her communique, Ms. Livingstone betrays that she obviously doesn’t understand her university’s error. Or even worse, she does understand and doesn’t care.

First, she persists in hyphenating human identity by human inclinations. As former lesbian activist Rosaria Butterfield has said repeatedly, this is a “19th-century categorical error” perpetuated by the ontological lie of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Even Gore Vidal understood as much. “There is no more such a thing as a homosexual person than there is a heterosexual person. These are behavioral adjectives,” he wrote. French historian Michel Foucault, too: “We are creating a hermaphroditism; we are creating a false species.” The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. likewise comprehended this when he famously declared that all people should be defined by the content of their character and nothing else.

Second, by doing the above, Ms. Livingstone insults all of us by defining human beings by their gut rather than by God. Her worldview balkanizes us by ranking and grouping us by our hungers, drives and desires. The bottom line is that she is saying that if you feel like it, that’s just who you are, and you can do nothing about it, regardless of how aberrant your feelings may be. Can’t we all agree that something is deeply wrong with this? In Ms. Livingstone’s broken and dark world, what’s next for Baylor University? Will she soon announce the “inclusion” of the incestuous Baylor community? Or maybe the minor-attracted Baylor community? Or what about the porn-addicted Baylor community, the vindictive Baylor community or perhaps the Baylor community that defines itself as racists, antisemites, misogynists or even dogs and cats?

The bottom line is that Ms. Livingstone’s letter exposes Baylor University’s woke underbelly. She is returning the grant because of the public pressure rightly caused by this paper and others, but she does not repent of her sinful worldview one iota.

While couching her letter in what she says is a “biblical understanding of human sexuality,” she doubles down on her unbiblical ideology of what it means to be human.

Whatever happened to St. Paul’s admonition that “if you are in Christ, you are a new creation! Behold, the old is gone; the new has come?” Whatever happened to his call to die to self rather than worship it?

If Baylor University were truly the “Christian university” Ms. Livingstone claims it is, it would be teaching that you must be born again, not that you are “born that way.”

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.