Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand (18 page)

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But the heart of the offending party is often hardened by the mere suggestion that they may be doing wrong. In fact, sometimes they respond with hostility, daring Christian lawyers to proceed with litigation—and so they do.
A large part of the problem comes from the law of qualified immunity. Under qualified immunity, government officials who are put in charge of enforcing government regulations are given protection from paying personal damages in the event of litigation. This would seem to make intuitive sense. If it became too easy to sue government officials and make them personally pay damages, no one would want to take on the role of public servant. But qualified immunity is only supposed to apply when a government official is acting in “reasonable reliance” on the law. In other words, if the official violated the law but was a) in fact unaware of it and also b) reasonably unaware of it, then the official cannot be sued.
The key to assessing reasonableness is determining whether the average, ordinary person would have been aware of the legal violation. If the average person would not have been aware that they were violating the law, then why punish the officials who violated it? Society has no interest in deterring reasonable conduct—only unreasonable conduct. The problem, of course, is that people will often try to “play dumb” and pretend they were unaware of wrong-doing. Enter Jonathan Lopez.
I first heard of Jonathan Lopez when he was a nineteen-year-old student at Los Angeles Community College (LACC). Some time during the fall semester of 2009, he was asked to give an informative speech on a topic of his own choosing. He chose to give his speech on the impact God has had on his life. That’s when the trouble began.
Jonathan’s professor, John Matteson, was fine with the speech until Lopez read a Bible verse dealing with marriage—specifically, affirming the traditional definition of marriage. When Jonathan read that verse, Professor Matteson jumped up out of his chair and called Lopez a “fascist bastard.” When the startled students turned toward Matteson, he simply asked them whether anyone had been offended by what Jonathan had said. When no one reported being offended, Matteson became very angry and dismissed the entire class.
The walk from the podium back to his seat in the rear of the class must have been a long one for Jonathan Lopez. But he had to make it because he needed to gather his belongings before heading to his next class. When he leaned down to pick up his book bag he noticed that it was unzipped. Professor Matteson had slipped a piece of paper into the bag. On that piece of paper was only one sentence: “Ask God what your grade is.”
Jonathan did the right thing in response to Professor Matteson’s mocking refusal to grade his speech. He went to see an LACC administrator about resolving the issue so he could get credit for the speech and, hopefully, pass the class. But his meeting with the administrator was not successful. The speech remained ungraded, and the situation remained unresolved.
That is when Jonathan decided to call my good friends at the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). They immediately took the case and wrote a letter to the president of LACC. It was a clear, concise letter explaining that Jonathan Lopez had been punished for simply exercising his rights to the free exercise of religion under the United States Constitution. Remember that Matteson never told Lopez he could not quote a verse from the Bible. He was being punished for allegedly offending students, which is a violation of the LACC speech code.
The ADF could have simply filed suit. But they wrote the letter first—thus remaining in compliance with the Apostle Paul’s instruction that we are supposed to live at peace with everyone whenever possible. But in this case, peace was not possible. The president of LACC reacted arrogantly by simply giving the ADF the phone number of the Office of the Attorney General of California. At the time of the incident, the California Attorney General was none other than Jerry Brown—a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage.
In other words, LACC simply flipped the ADF the middle finger. So ADF sued on behalf of Jonathan Lopez. His efforts paid off. A federal court granted an injunction and struck down the LACC speech code in a matter of weeks. But the case was far from over.
The LACC administration dug in its heels and appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals-the most liberal circuit in the United States. Zach, you will recall that this is the circuit which, among other things, has ruled against the use of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
It is unsurprising that the Ninth Circuit decided to overrule Jonathan’s free speech victory. If there is one surprising aspect of the appeal, it is that the judges were not angry with John Matteson for using the word “God” in his infamous “Ask God what your grade is” note to Mr. Lopez. After all, the Ninth Circuit wants to ban all other references to God in the classroom. I guess some uses of the word “God” are more equal than others.
Jonathan and the ADF appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court, which unfortunately refused to grant certiorari. But the ADF and other brave Christian plaintiffs continue to defend freedom of speech on campus by means of our legal system—and they are right to do so.
Remember that Jonathan tried everything in his power to resolve this conflict peacefully—in accordance with Romans 12:18. He went and spoke to the administration. He had lawyers write a well-reasoned letter. He only sued because he was, in effect, asked to do so by a college administration that rudely thumbed its nose at him. After he won a quick legal victory, it was the anti-Christian defenders of the speech code who revived the lawsuit on appeal.
You have to respect Jonathan Lopez for showing tremendous courage since the beginning of this saga when he was just a nineteen-year old student simply trying to give a speech of encouragement and hope (not Hope). Since then, he has been mocked, insulted, and ridiculed by people who have far greater authority and influence than he does. But I suspect that, in the final analysis, all of their names will be forgotten, and he will be remembered as an exceptional man in an unexceptional generation.
We can seldom control the manner in which we will be remembered. But we all must decide whether we will live lives that will be worth remembering. I’ll never forget my grandfather because he began taking on the forces of evil and living as a warrior when he was only a teenager. For the same reason, I’ll never forget the name of Jonathan Lopez. I hope you’ll remember him, just as I hope that one day you’ll be remembered for standing tall among a generation that is shrinking.
LETTER 33
 
How to Answer a False Accusation of Homophobia
 
Zach
,
In case you haven’t already noticed, the tolerance of the “tolerant” generally doesn’t run very deep. Any intellectual opposition drives leftists to extremely hostile behavior. If you criticize them or even express disagreement with their beliefs, you can expect to encounter scorn, derision, and name-calling. So you need to be ready to deal with their attacks. Let’s take the common accusation of “homophobia” as an example.
The term “homophobia” is nothing if not judgmental. It is used in an attempt to portray opponents of the gay rights movement as somehow morally deficient. But it goes beyond that to imply that the opponent of gay rights is somehow mentally disturbed. That is quite an interesting development, when one considers the history of conflict between the gay rights movement and the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
Although it may be difficult for you to imagine, the APA characterized homosexuality as a mental illness as recently as the early 1970s. But an organized political coalition within the APA managed to have homosexuality declassified as a mental illness. They got homosexuality removed from the comprehensive list of mental illnesses known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, and eventually they set about making opposition to homosexuality look like a mental illness.
Approximately twenty years after homosexuality was declassified from the DSM, the word “homophobia” began to creep into the national debate over gay rights issues. The term first came to the attention of many Americans in 1993 soon after Bill Clinton took office as our forty-second president, in the context of the debate over Clinton’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy allowing gays to serve in the military, although not openly.
It is conceivable that a person could oppose gays in the military out of some irrational fear of homosexuals. That is what the term “homophobia” originally meant—not just a fear of homosexuals but an irrational one. But that is no longer what the term means. It now no longer describes a fear at all, but rather any sort of opposition to the gay rights agenda. Let me give you an example.
I recently wrote a column criticizing my university for releasing a list of “gay-friendly” churches in the Wilmington area. I was disappointed with the list for several reasons. One reason was that a government institution—the UNC-Wilmington LGBTQIA Office—was helping private citizens select churches, and that they were doing so using taxpayer resources. It also bothered me that they only selected five churches as “gay-friendly.” The implication was that the other 245 Wilmington churches were somehow “unfriendly” towards gay people. I don’t think that’s true. The response to my column was predictable: I was accused of being a “homophobe.”
I asked my accusers these two questions (using a form email response):
1. What exactly does homophobia mean?
2. What does homophobia have to do with the situation at hand?
Unsurprisingly, I did not receive a single response to either of my very simple questions. The reason for that is also very simple: homophobia is a loosely defined term that is used to describe any opposition to the gay political agenda. It is broadly and carelessly used against those who are not afraid of speaking out against the gay agenda in the hopes that they will be silenced because they are afraid to speak out. In other words, the people who complain about “homophobia” are not really fighting against fear of gay people. They are deliberately encouraging it.
LETTER 34
 
Matthew 23
 
Dear Zach
,
I was once challenged by a couple of young Christian men who were dissatisfied with my response to a controversy involving the promotion of the transgender movement at my university. The controversy began when the feminist leadership of my department (The UNC-Wilmington Sociology and Criminology Department) sponsored a film that encourages young people who are considering having sex changes. I responded with a scathingly sarcastic editorial ridiculing them for doing so. I’ll explain why I did that after I explain why the feminists did what they did.
The motivation for encouraging sex change operations is rooted in a feminist agenda that denies any significant biological differences between the sexes. The feminists want to show that any unequal outcomes between men and women are due to patriarchal oppression. Therefore, they try to show that all differences between the sexes are merely “socially constructed.” This is done in order to garner political support for massive social engineering. In the end, it produces a society with two kinds of people: women and women with penises.
Zach, I want to be clear on two preliminary matters:
1. I support the right of feminists to argue completely ridiculous positions. If the feminists are too dense to recognize the many and profound biological differences between the sexes, so be it. The more often they make absurd arguments, the easier it is for me to destroy the credibility of those who murder innocent children in the name of “choice.” In other words, I will defend vigorously their right to make fools of themselves.
2. When these feminists engage in speech that is both a) knowingly false, and b) harmful to other people, I will use a lethal combination of truth and ridicule to destroy their credibility. I do not do this out of a desire to hurt the feminists. I do it out of a desire to help the people the feminists are hurting.
Although the use of ridicule can be effective, many Christians shy away from using it under any circumstances. They do this largely because of a misunderstanding of what the Apostle Paul said in the Epistle to the Ephesians. In Ephesians 4:15, Paul issued a command to speak the truth in love. But those who know anything about the manner in which the Bible was written know that it was not divided into verses originally—in fact, not until hundreds of years after it had been written. If we read individual verses of the Bible while ignoring surrounding verses in the larger paragraph—or chapter or book—we are likely to fall prey to mistakes of interpretation.
To put things in context, Ephesians 4:15 is part of a larger section of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians that exhorts Christians to speak kindly to one another in the process of resolving church conflict. But many Christians misinterpret the passage in two important ways:1) by assuming that the passage applies to all Christian communication in all contexts, and 2) by thinking that it precludes any and all use of ridicule.
Such an interpretation is demonstrably false unless we want to believe that one part of the Bible contradicts another part of the Bible. Since Jesus himself uses ridicule—most notably in Matthew 23—it would be a contradiction to assert the existence of a Biblical ban on ridicule. Nonetheless, Jesus did not use ridicule toward everyone. In fact, Jesus seems to have reserved it exclusively for a special group of teachers called the Pharisees, who incurred his wrath more often than anyone else featured in the Gospel accounts.

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