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Thread: How Protestors Are Trying to Shut Down My Campus Event - Michael Brown

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    How Protestors Are Trying to Shut Down My Campus Event - Michael Brown

    When I received the invitation to speak on homosexuality and the Bible at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, I immediately accepted the invitation but told the campus group that invited me that it would be difficult to hold the event. I knew there would be opposition, both internally and externally, and I knew there would be attempts to derail the talk.

    Sure enough, with the event scheduled for Tuesday night, February 13 (so, barely 24 hours from the writing of this column), there has been pressure on financial sponsors to drop out, protests have been called for, the school has been asked to cancel the event, and false information about me is spreading online. So much for tolerance and diversity!

    When my book A Queer Thing Happened to America came out in 2011, I offered to debate any topic in the book with a qualified academic or LGBT leader on any campus in America.

    My goal was not simply to debate important issues but also to conduct myself in the most Christlike, God-honoring way possible in order to build a bridge of constructive interaction between Christian campus groups and the LGBT groups.

    Not only were we declined in city after city, but in some cities, the Christian campus groups told our contact people, "If you try to hold this event on our campus, we will shut it down."

    They were so concerned that they would lose their right to be on campus if such an event took place that they were willing to actively oppose it. Talk about a spirit of fear and intimidation.

    A friend of ours reached out to a Christian professor at the University of Central Florida, and she booked a room for our use. As a result of this, I was told she was threatened with the loss of her job. A professor from another campus agreed to debate me on, "Same-Sex Marriage: Should It Be Legal?", and I agreed, even though that was not discussed in my book. (Go here to watch the debate.)

    The week of the debate, a conference call was held with 11 people (but not me), including university vice-presidents, LGBT campus leaders, and the school's chief of police. (The campus has more than 60,000 students.) In the end, they decided that cancelling the event would be worse publicity than holding the event. But we were required to pay for four armed policemen to be present to maintain order. And that was back in 2011, when same-sex "marriage" was illegal in Florida.

    Fast forward to 2018, where conservative voices are commonly opposed on college campuses – let alone Christian conservatives – and you can see why I'm not in the least bit surprised by the hatred and intolerance being shown.

    What makes this all the more ironic is that I was asked to speak on "Christian Mistreatment of Homosexuality," meaning, I would start my talk by addressing areas where the church has failed to reach out to the LGBT community with compassion and sensitivity. In response, the social media campaign against me and the event announces: "Rally against this hate, because hate happens here."

    Then, in the campus piece attacking me, there is a striking quote, allegedly from me: "[LGBT] people are inherently unhappy, unhealthy, sexually immoral or rebellious to the will of God."

    The problem is that I never said those words, despite the quotation marks. It was a critic of mine who said this, yet the protest organizers cite it as my words.

    Am I surprised? Not in the least. We will win every argument based on truth, which is why so few people are willing to debate and why there is so much reliance on spreading lies. And when it comes to our attitude and demeanor, we will overcome hatred with love every time. That's why the opposition must falsely accuse us of spewing hatred and lies.

    The protest piece even cites article titles of mine, such as, "Are Women Nothing More than Sexual Objects," as if I believed that women were sexual objects (whereas my article says the exact opposite, of course).

    And then, of course, the protest piece mentions that the Southern Poverty Law Center officially labeled me as a hate group member, failing to realize that: 1) Dr. Ben Carson was put on a similar list; 2) the charges against me were completely vacuous; and 3) the SPLC removed the link to my name years ago. (For the record, I took their attack on me as a badge of honor but still corrected their many errors.)

    As of this moment, the event organizer, Ratio Christi, is not certain if the campus will block them from using the building that has been booked and if we'll be forced to (or even able to) meet in another venue nearby. But I plan to make the two-hour drive there either way, eager to interact with the protestors, eager to give a presentation and take audience questions, and eager to hold the school to account, challenging them to do the right thing. Will they?

    Stay tuned for more details and, hopefully, video footage of the talk. Truth can be temporarily resisted but never stifled in the end.

    https://askdrbrown.org/library/how-p...y-campus-event

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    And here is the follow up column about what happened:

    Overcoming Hatred With Love on a University Campus

    The warnings were dire. “Hate happens here” declared one banner headline. A student remarked, “As a black, queer and genderqueer person, it really would be a disservice to myself and to my community to stand by silently as this man comes to campus and says very violent language. We’re not going to tolerate it. It’s just as simple as that. This is our campus.”

    As expressed by one protester, people use religious speech to motivate hate and aggression and violence, utilizing disruptive and horrible language. For his part, he was there protesting “to help combat that type of awful and toxic ideology.”

    This was the buildup to my talk on the church and the LGBT community at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, as students were warned to stay away from what was surely to be a hate-filled presentation by a hate-filled individual. In fact, police officers were present and many were on edge.

    In the end, no security was needed, and I was thanked by quite a few LGBT-identified students for the spirit of my talk and the gracious interaction that was fostered.

    But of course. There was no hatred on my lips because there was no hatred in my heart.

    That’s why I started the talk by reading from 1 John 4, a wonderful passage on love. John wrote: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 John 4:7-12).

    And that was the thrust of my message: We do what we do based on love, and love and truth go hand in hand.

    Sadly, all too often, the church has failed to reach out with love and compassion to those who identify as LGBT, branding them the worst of all sinners and being insensitive to the great rejection they have often experienced.

    For these failings, I apologized to those present, also renouncing the religious fanatics who pose as Christians and proclaim, “God hates fags.” These are the same people who celebrate the deaths of our armed forces overseas because we have a “fag army.”

    At the same time, love calls on us to speak the truth, even if it offends, and the truth of the matter is simple: God designed men for women and women for men, not men for men or women for women. And His best plan for someone struggling with gender confusion is not lifelong hormone treatments and radical surgery. Instead, it is transformation from the inside so that person is at home with their biological sex.

    That was the thrust of my message, speaking of God’s love from the beginning to the end, before hearing the testimony of a former lesbian and then taking questions for almost one hour.

    At the end of the night, a young man who identified as a bisexual Christian in a relationship with another man wanted to thank me personally. He knew full well that I believed he was sinning against God and himself by being with another man. Yet he could not thank me enough for the open and caring environment that allowed him to listen without putting his guard up. Isn’t that the Jesus way?

    It’s true that the world will hate us and that we will be persecuted for righteousness, as many New Testament passages declare. At the same time, we are called overcome hatred with love, to dispel misinformation with truth, and to thwart anger with patience.

    We’re also taught to rely on the power of prayer, and I was told that many Christians spent much time praying for the event. I believe that’s a big reason it went so smoothly, especially with the fervor of some of the protests earlier in the day.

    And my hope is that with events like this, we can set an example for compassionate outreach that does not compromise the truth. To do so is neither loving nor honest, and the Lord calls to be both.

    https://askdrbrown.org/library/overc...versity-campus

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    Its nice to see that it turned out well and that the university did not cave and cancel the event due to a few vocal protesters.

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    Southern Poverty Law Center Read something else about them recently...they seem to be getting pretty influential....and suppressive?

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