P.C. vs. A.D.:

Shut Up and Embrace Diversity: Some find "tolerance" intolerable. (Compiled by Rob Moll, 12/09/2003, Christianity Today: Weblog)

When Elizabeth Hansen asked Ann Arbor, Michigan's Pioneer High School administrator if her views could be included in the school's Diversity Week forum on "Homosexuality and Religion," school officials said "no" because she wanted to include a "negative" message based on her Roman Catholic faith.

The forum included "two Episcopalian ministers, a Presbyterian minister, a Presbyterian deacon, a rabbi and a pastor of the United Church of Christ," according to the Associated Press. The school's Gay/Straight alliance handpicked everyone on the forum, said the Detroit Free Press. "At one point, officials decided to cancel the panel discussion after one official said excluding an opposing viewpoint was illegal. But the Gay/Straight Alliance persuaded officials to relent and exclude anyone with an opposing point of view to sit on the panel."

Hansen was allowed to give a speech on "What Diversity Means to Me," but school officials eliminated one paragraph in which Hansen expressed her view that homosexuality was wrong. Hansen, who was a senior at the time, filed suit with the help of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, alleging the school acted to "prevent the expression of the traditional Christian view toward homosexuality at this panel discussion and throughout the '2002 Diversity Week' events," according to The Detroit News. [...]

The judge ruled last week against the school, saying,

"This case presents the ironic, and unfortunate, paradox of a public high school celebrating 'diversity' by refusing to permit the presentation to students of an 'unwelcomed' viewpoint on the topic of homosexuality and religion, while actively promoting the competing view. This practice of 'one-way diversity,' unsettling in itself, was rendered still more troubling—both constitutionally and ethically—by the fact that the approved viewpoint was, in one manifestation, presented to students as religious doctrine by six clerics (some in full garb) quoting from religious scripture. In its other manifestation, it resulted in the censorship by school administrators of a student's speech about 'what diversity means to me,' removing that portion of the speech in which the student described the unapproved viewpoint."

"All of this, of course, raises the question, among others presented here, of what 'diversity' means and whether a school may promote one view of 'diversity' over another. Even accepting that the term 'diversity' has evolved in recent years to mean, at least colloquially, something more than the dictionary definition, the notion of sponsorship of one viewpoint to the exclusion of another hardly seems to further the school's purported objective of 'celebrating diversity.'

Diversity apparently means divergence.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2003 2:25 PM