Proving again that there’s no one as illiberal as a liberal and giving new meaning to the term “March Madness,” USA Today’s For the Win publication is calling for Oral Roberts University (ORU) to be banned from NCAA competition. The paper complains that the Christian sense of virtue the school upholds is “archaic.” (Is that a bad thing?)
As LifeNews reports:
With “archaic” rules that are wildly out of touch with modern society … Oral Roberts, which has already upset Ohio State and Florida, is definitely not the feel-good March Madness story we need, writes [For the Win’s] Hemal Jhaveri, the “race and inclusion editor.” (Yeah, that’s a job, apparently.) She admits the evangelical university from Tulsa is a fan favorite as an underdog, but she detests its strict student requirements. ORU’s “deeply bigoted anti-LGBTQ+ [read: pro-virtue] polices can’t and shouldn’t be ignored,” Jhaveri writes in a despicable screed.
… That’s just the opening salvo of a long bombardment on ORU and a call for the NCAA to ban the school. Headed for the Sweet 16 in the tournament this coming weekend, Oral Roberts is pummeled for its fundamentalist values and beliefs. It’s “a relic of the past” and completely incompatible with the NCAA’s values of equality and inclusion.
Jhaveri, the would-be moralistic referee, calls fouls on ORU for a student code of conduct that bans profanity, social dancing and wearing shorts to class. She demands fans protest Oral Roberts for its homophobia as the Golden Eagles advance in the tournament.
Wow, banning profanity. What radicals. I mean, what point is there to life if you can’t curse like a drunken sailor within earshot of children? Of course, George Washington did in a 1776 order call profanity a “foolish and wicked practice” and “a vice so mean and low without any temptation that every man of sense and character detests and despises it.” But, hey, that’s just another reason to cancel him and topple his statues, right?
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As for the “homophobia” charge, Jhaveri writes that twice “in their student handbook, Oral Roberts specifically prohibits homosexuality. In their student conduct section, under the heading of Personal Behavior, the school expressly condemns homosexuality, mentioning it in the same breath as ‘occult practices.’”
Of course, this complaint is common among one-dimensional, shallow, emotion-driven people. Unlike the sexual devolutionaries, informed Christians don’t fixate on homosexuality or consider it in isolation. It is, in fact, just one part of a comprehensive model for man’s sexuality, one Christians believe is divinely ordained. This model doesn’t just proscribe homosexual behavior, but any sexual activity apart from the conjugal act within the context of a man and woman in holy matrimony.
Therefore, rubber-stamping homosexual behavior would also mean legitimizing everything below it in the hierarchy of sin, including fornication, self-gratification, polyamory, viewing pornography, and entertaining impure thoughts.
In other words, the sexual devolutionaries’ demand that Christians accept homosexual behavior amounts to a demand for the collapse of the whole Christian model for man’s sexuality. (By the way, why doesn’t the Left demand the same of Muslims?)
Jhaveri doesn’t understand this, and probably doesn’t care. But she compensates for what she lacks in sagacity with self-righteousness. “However accomplished its young student athletes are, the school [ORU] is a hotbed of institutional transphobia, homophobia with regressive, sexist policies,” she fulminates. “There is no way to separate their men’s basketball team from the dangers of their religious dogma, no matter how many top seeds they defeat.”
“Often, athletic accomplishments and victories on the court make up for moral failings all the time,” she continues. “In this case [sic] though, whatever the Oral Roberts men’s basketball team manages to do on the court can’t obscure the dangerous and hateful ideology of its core institution.” And thus spake Jhaveri.
It’s no surprise that the sexual devolutionaries would find ORU’s standards “archaic.” They only perceive the “new” and the “archaic” because they’re blind to the eternal. And the “new” is superior to them because it’s of this time, and this time is superior to them because they happen to occupy it. But no amount of chronological chauvinism changes the fact that “fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions,” as G.K. Chesterton put it.
Chesterton also noted that the church “is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present.” This is because Christianity upholds Truth (properly defined as universal, unchanging, eternal, and existing apart from man), which refutes all lies in every time.
The Truth is at present especially apart from Jhaveri and her fellow travelers, moral relativists/nihilists all. They fancy that right and wrong are synonymous with man’s collective preferences and thus change with the times. (Now you know why they assume the Constitution does the same.) Blind to Truth, they’re belligerent toward Truth-tellers.
They also assume that their “values” are those of tomorrow, that Christianity will disappear as modernity marches on. And they can ban ORU, remove Christian universities’ accreditation (which they’ve also attempted), and try to “cancel” Christians.
And this has been done before. “A lie has speed, but Truth has endurance,” however. The Romans two millennia ago tried to cancel Christianity; they’re gone but the church is still here. The Soviets tried to cancel Christianity; they’re gone and the church is still here. Likewise did the 1920s Mexican government, the 1930s Popular Front regime in Spain, and the Nazis try to cancel Christianity.
They’re gone and the church is still here.
So Jhaveri and her radical fellows fancy themselves the wave of the future, but they’re just the next wave of failure. The church will be around long after they and their agenda are dust.
