About Face: Marquette Accepts “Christmas Tree”

It was just what one would expect of a politically correct university (although not of a genuinely Catholic university): describing a Christmas tree as merely a “tree,” as Marquette did when it announced a tree lighting taking place yesterday afternoon.

Our Sunday night post on this was quickly picked up on social media, and also by Charlie Sykes, who discussed it yesterday (Monday) morning. Here is Sykes:



Then, all of a sudden, announcements from Marquette of the event suddenly began to include the word “Christmas.”

There was an e-mail, dated Monday at 3:17 p.m. that announced the “Annual Christmas Tree lighting ceremony.”

And sometime yesterday an announcement on “Marquette Today,” first posted on November 21, was updated to say that the ceremony is “tonight.” The other change? The inclusion of the word “Christmas.” Here is the blurb on “Marquette Today” as it appeared on Sunday afternoon, and here is the way it appeared when we saved the page as a PDF today.

Somebody forgot to sanitize the University calendar, however, since today the entry still omits “Christmas” just as it did on Sunday.

How Did it Happen?

It would be nice to know who first decided that a Christmas tree could not be called a “Christmas Tree.” But Mary Janz, Executive Director of Housing and Residence Life (the office that oversees the Residence Hall Association, which sponsored the event), has not responded to a request for an explanation of the policy, who made it, and how it was made.

Likewise, University spokesman Brian Dorrington did not immediately respond to a request for a statement about the change of policy that allowed “Christmas.”

The banning of “Christmas Tree” probably did not come from top University officials. More likely, some Residence Life official decided that “Christmas Tree” was not sufficiently “inclusive.” But that is the problem. The campus bureaucracy is dominated by the kind of people who define “inclusive” as requiring the exclusion of things explicitly Christian.

And these are the people who make most of the day-to-day decisions.

Update

A woman posting a comment on the Badger Catholic blog said the following:

I attend Marquette and this is the actual text from the E-mail we received, “Reminder: Residence Hall Association to hold annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony tonight

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The Residence Hall Association will hold its annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony, “Igniting Hope,” on Monday, Nov. 28, at 5 p.m. in Westowne Square. The ceremony will include speakers, performances and the tree lighting. A reception, including musical performances, crafts and snacks, will follow from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the AMU Monaghan Ballrooms.

This, of course, is the November 21 post on “Marquette Today” that has been modified with “Christmas” added. Here, again, is the original November 21 post.

Marquette, after our story broke, appears to have been aggressively e-mailing people with the version of the announcement that includes “Christmas.”

Secular Activists Trying to Suppress Christian Schools

From The Federalist, an essay titled “The Other Campus Free-Speech Problem No One’s Talking About.” Some key points:

During the past few years, responding to ever-more draconian codes on secular campuses aimed at constraining free speech, dissenting voices have been raised here and there across the political spectrum, defending free expression and free association for all. This addition of conscientious objection outside conservative and religious ranks is a welcome development. It also brings us to one other large threat to free speech in education these days—one that’s still in the closet.

Secularist progressivism claims to champion diversity, but its activists today do not tolerate genuine diversity, including and es­pecially in the realm of ideas, as revealed by today’s legal and other attacks on Christian colleges, Christian associations and clubs, Christian schools, Christian students, and Christian homeschooling.

These are bellwether ideological campaigns that have yet to gar­ner the attention they deserve outside religious circles. Their logical conclusion is to interfere with and shut down Christian education itself—from elementary school on up to religious colleges and uni­versities.

It’s Not An Education If It Includes Christian Ideas?

Consider a few particulars. The Christian college club Intervarsity has had its credentials questioned on secular campuses around the country. So have other student groups including Chi Alpha and the Christian Legal Society, the focus of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which found that Hastings College had not violated the First Amendment in forcing the CLS to accept members who violated its Christian moral code. During the past ten years, two high-profile Christian colleges—The King’s College in New York, and Gordon College in Massachusetts—have been subjected to accreditation battles. Meanwhile, home-schooling remains an object of attack by leftish pundits, New Atheists, the National Education Association, and other progressive standard-bearers.

Still other authorities want to discredit religious higher education altogether. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014, a professor at the Uni­versity of Pennsylvania called accreditation for any Christian col­lege a “scandal,” adding that “[p]roviding accreditation to colleges like [evangelical Protestant] Wheaton [College] makes a mockery of whatever academic and intellectual standards the process of ac­creditation is supposed to uphold.” Trinity Western University in Canada has likewise been embroiled for years in a battle to keep its accreditation—because its community members pledge not to have sex outside traditional marriage.

Let’s ask the obvious question: exactly whose schools are being at­tacked as unworthy, substandard, and undeserving of recognition? Christians’ schools, that’s whose—not progressive flagships like Bennington, Middlebury, or Sarah Lawrence. If religious tradi­tionalists were fanning out to campaign against schools dominated by other canons, cacophony would resound from Cupertino to Ban­gor. But because the prejudice propelling these attacks has Christi­anity in its sights, no one outside religious circles objects.

These efforts to impede religious education are also part of an ongoing paradox. It is not Christian colleges that have made a habit of ha­rassing and intimidating speakers who represent different points of view; it is nonreligious campuses. When socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders gave a speech in September 2015 at Liberty University, media accounts, including in The New York Times, took note of how courteous and polite the student body was, and how they unfailingly applauded a speaker who acknowledged at the outset profoundly disagreeing with their views.

Contrast their civility with the hostile reception certain other thinkers are guaranteed these days, just by setting foot on secular campuses. Followers of the Cross, especially, are often greeted by an especially bilious class of protester. Thus, for example, University of Tulsa students protested a former self-professed lesbian turned Christian—on the grounds that calling something “sinful” is “thinly veiled hate speech,” as one leader of the protest explained.

Simi­larly, when Jennifer Roback Morse—a former Ivy League professor and head of the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to traditional Christian teaching—appeared at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 20 students interrupted her talk with chants, waving signs inscribed with various obscenities. When Christian speaker Ravi Zacharias spoke at the University of Pennsylvania, a local athe­ist group handed out bingo-style cards mocking the speaker to every student who entered the hall. The list could go on.

Read the entire essay.

At Marquette

One might believe that Marquette, a “Catholic” university, would at least be tolerant of Christian teachings about sexuality.

But to believe that, one would have to believe Marquette is really a Catholic university.

At Marquette, the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship was threatened with being kicked off campus for canning an officer who was engaged in a homosexual affair. He made it clear he did not accept Christian teaching about homosexuality, and would continue the affair. Under pressure from alumni, Marquette relented.

This was in 2011. Would Marquette back off today? We doubt it, given that the institution seems to seek out every way possible to pander to the campus gay lobby.

All of this, of course, represents the glaring hypocrisy of the Orwellian phrase “diversity and inclusion.” “Diversity” is interpreted to exclude a large body of ideas, including the ideas that Christians have about sexuality and the ideas that all civilizations have had about marriage until very recently.  “Inclusion” means intolerant and exclusionary conduct toward Christians and others who hold to these ideas.

Obama Contraceptive Mandate Isn’t a “Women’s Issue”

Liberals have portrayed conservative resistance to the Obama Administration’s mandate that Catholic (and other religious) institutions have to supply free contraceptives to employees as part of a “war on women.”

Of course, in the eyes of liberals, “women” equals feminists.

But real world women typically don’t agree with feminists. This is certainly true of abortion, where women are either no different from men in their opinions or, in some of the best polls, a bit more opposed to abortion being legal.

But what about the contraceptive mandate?

A recent Gallup poll asks respondents “How closely are you following the news about whether religious-based employers should cover contraception for their employees as part of their health plans — very closely, somewhat closely, not too closely, or not at all?”

Then, respondents were asked “Based on what you know or have read about the matter, do you sympathize more with the views of – [ROTATED: religious leaders (or) the Obama administration]?”

Overall, 48 percent of the sample agreed with “religious leaders,” and 45 percent with the “Obama administration.”

But men and women gave virtually identical answers. 49 percent of men agreed with “religious leaders,” and 47 percent of women did. The two percent difference is within the margin of error.

While 39 percent of Catholics and 42 percent of Protestants agreed with the Obama Administration, 68 percent of people who professed no religion agreed with the Obama Administration. So the “war on women” seems to be, in reality, a war of irreligious people on religious people.