Gay Kids At Christian Schools

90% of my school career was spent in Christian school. Aside from two years at Jefferson Middle School (the same school Charlton Heston's character went to in Planet Of The Apes), I was at the now-defunct Fort Wayne Christian School. For college I signed a twelve-item Life Together Statement and became part of the Taylor University community.

I'm not gay. But there were always gay kids in my classes. In both high school and college I could have told you with 90% accuracy which of the guys were gay. I could have also told you which of the girls were lesbian and which other girls were remaining "technical virgins" by experimenting with lesbian sex. I could have also told you which girls (nearly all) were keeping their "technical virginity" the Monica Lewinsky way. Because there are two things about teenagers that are true: they are in sexual overdrive and they think they're the first ones it's happened to so no one else will understand.

When you run a school that houses teenagers, I think you need to have a bit of grace when it comes to sexual transgressions. A zero-tolerance stance for any sexual issues, whether its vanilla hetero love or the more exotic homosexual flavours, is not practical. For every sexual rule violation you catch and release, there are 50 others swimming murkily below the surface. That's why I wonder about this school's decision to expel a gay guy.

They're within their rights to do so, clearly. A private institution can suspend or expel people for anything. That Life Together Statement I mentioned? Yeah. We could, when I attended the school from 1998-1990, be expelled for dancing with the opposite sex or watching videotapes. Whole groups of people were forming covert Dirty Dancing cartels right under the administration's nose. No one got expelled for it, of course, but they did kick out 16 kids from Third And Fourth Gerig for drinking beer. (Also a no-no). It's their school and if you attend it, you agree to abide by their rules, no matter how ridiculous the rules may seem.

But in every case where my schools expelled or suspended someone, they punished everyone involved. All the kids at the Gerig Beer Bash got either suspended or expelled. All the kids who had guns and drugs at the Crabb House got suspended or expelled. In a college it would be impossible to expell every kid who is sexually active. While I think they have every right to do so, there is no way for universities to cast a net that wide. And so it looks kind of stupid to kick out the one kid who has the misfortune of being the one you caught. Better to have some in-house disciplinary action for rule-breaking.

Now, to all of you--gay or straight--who may be thinking about going to a Christian college. Listen up. Many of them are good schools. I studied with professors who trained at Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, and myriad other top institutions. I got a fantastic education. But I knew the rules going into it. As dumb as it was that we couldn't watch videos, it wasn't a secret. I had to sign the statement with my application. It's paying the piper, it's going along to get along, it's all the things you have to do when you're an adult. I didn't go to Bryn Mawr, despite a scholarship offer, because I didn't like certain school policies. It was my choice to make. When you are going to college you are entering the adult world, so act like it and choose wisely.