5 highlights from Trump's Religious Liberty Commission hearing
5. Leaders of religious schools speak out against efforts to force them to violate their beliefs
While Garrett provided statistics about the prevalence of hostility toward religion as it relates to education across the U.S., another panel at the event featured leaders of religious schools who shared specific examples of the discrimination they have faced.
The Rev. Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose parish includes the Sacred Heart of Jesus Academy, elaborated on the adverse treatment experienced by the Catholic school.
“Recently, the Michigan Supreme Court reinterpreted the state’s nondiscrimination law redefining sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity,” he lamented.
Sirico warned, “This new framework would compel us to hire staff whose lives and words openly contradict Catholic teaching to adopt speech contrary to the Church’s doctrine, such as pronoun usage divorced from biological reality or to suppress Catholic teaching altogether when educating our students or even advertising for enrollment.”
Sirico added that his church is challenging the interpretation of the law with the assistance of the conservative nonprofit legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom. Todd Williams, president of the Pennsylvania-based Christian institution Cairn University, offered examples of how hostility from “regulatory” and “accrediting bodies” has negatively impacted the academic programs at his school.
“We chose to close the social work program, eliminating both a BSW degree and a newly launched MSW degree in light of the Council for Social Work Education’s overreach,” he said. Williams pointed to efforts to “compel us to write curriculum that was rooted in Marxism and intersectionality, especially as it applied to matters of human sexuality and gender” as the reason why his institution decided to cut ties with the Council for Social Work Education and eliminate its social work degrees.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
