Both before California’s vote on Proposition 8 and after we warned about the threat same-sex marriage posed to religious liberty. Now in yet another example of how same-sex marriage threatens the First Amendment, a student is suing Los Angeles City College over free speech. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Student Jonathan Lopez says his professor called him a “fascist bastard” and refused to let him finish his speech against same-sex marriage during a public speaking class last November, weeks after California voters approved the ban on such unions.
When Lopez tried to find out his mark for the speech, the professor, John Matteson, allegedly told him to “ask God what your grade is,” the suit says.
Lopez also said the teacher threatened to have him expelled when he complained to higher-ups.
As Heritage scholar Tom Messner warned last year:
Those who take the traditional view of marriage can encounter hostility even in the academy, where esteem for free speech and thought are often proclaimed as cardinal virtues. For example, Gilbert Meilaender, a former professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, was vilified on campus after he joined a group of Christian and Jewish scholars in signing a statement about “the homosexual movement” that called for “a civil conversation about the kind of people we are and hope to be.” Students called for a boycott of his classes, others labeled him a “super bigot,” some talked about bringing charges against him through the college’s judicial system, and a quarter of the faculty signed a letter calling his views “intellectually naive.” Philip Turner, then dean of the Divinity School at Yale University, encountered similar outrage from students for signing the same statement, and another professor at a major university would not sign the statement in the first place “because it would jeopardize his grant applications to major foundations.” That such acts of hostility to religion might not violate any laws makes them no less opprobrious and redefining marriage will certainly make them more difficult to combat.
