Religious Freedom

[Anonymous]

I read this article today and to me, (my viewpoint), its just another case of those who preach tolerance, diversity, and freedom of expression attempting to shut down someone else’s viewpoints and ability to express it.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/september/wrong-kind-of-christian-vanderbilt-university.html?start=1” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/september/wrong-kind-of-christian-vanderbilt-university.html?start=1

I find myself in a strange place within my adapted belief system. It appears to me (and I may be wrong), but in looking at the general bloggernacle and either disaffected Mormons or un-Orthodox mormons, most consider themselves liberals or in political terms, progressives.

I would say my religious beliefs are liberal, but my political leanings are toward moderate libertarianism. And in particular I value freedom of expression, speech, press, and religious worship to be paramount to almost anything else. The ability to debate and think and confront and criticize, to me, is an indispensable part of a democratic society. What I find strange, and perhaps someone can explain this to me, is why so many disaffected Mormons’s eschew the authoritarianism and hierarchy structure of the LDS church only to become aligned with a political party, that in my view, is authoritarian in their approach to public policy, religious worship, and speech?

I don’t think its debatable that most large universities lean liberal. So those in charge of the types of decisions the woman in the article faced are being made by those that preach diversity. I am sincere in wanting to understand because I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. So a couple of questions:

1) Is there anyone on this site who leans progressive and would support the administration in the article linked above?

1a) Why?

2) If you do lean liberal/progressive and would not support the administration in the article above, why?

3) and if you would not does it bother you that such things are happening?

[Anonymous]

Politically, I might be classed as a social liberal and fiscal conservative. I vote for whom I think is the best candidate regardless of party affiliation. I think we’ve had very few good choices for President for a while. I loathe the primary process that tends to weed out the true moderates and leaves us with at least one extremist in the general election (either as potential President or Vice President).

I disagree strongly with what happened at Vanderbilt and agree completely that it shows how exclusionary many people are who are seen and classed as liberal based on their views in a vacuum. I saw it in more limited ways when I was in college. Harvard is seen as a very liberal university (and it is in many ways), but the tendency to police speech and action too strictly was visible, as well. Unrighteous dominion knows no ideological boundaries, and people are prone to enforce their views regardless of what those views are.

I read an article in college that said, at the extremes, a liberal is just a conservative with more friends. The conservative says, “I’m right about everything, and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong,” while a liberal says, “Everyone is right, except those who disagree with me.” The first circle tends to be smaller, but both circles are exclusionary in nature.

[Anonymous]

I consider myself a moderate progressive.

I’m looking at this from a perspective where the university wants to allow campus organizations but also have some control in what groups are allowed and how they operate.

Could the KKK or Black Panthers open up a campus chapter? How do you stop them? If you allow student groups, how do you legally discriminate against ones that you find objectionable?

I believe that the administration might be trying to walk this line. They might have no problem with the particular student Christian group but in order to keep these more objectionable groups out they had to form a blanket policy that all student organizations must allow all to join and all to be leaders.

In a weird way this could be the administration’s way of not discriminating. All are held to the same policy – a policy that should keep out divisive, exclusive, rigid, and hierachical organizations possibly with outside control and encourage democratic, flexible, inclusive, locally controlled, student run organizations.

At my workplace groups, postings, distributing leaflets, etc. is not allowed. The reason for this is the fear that if it is allowed for some, then we would not be able to legally prohibit union organizers from doing the same. As a consequence nobody is allowed to do it.

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