Some Notre Dame alumni, faculty, and students are again irate at
the administration, this time for sponsoring the Progressive
Student Alliance's participation in last week's gay pride
march/protest here in D.C.
I wasn't going to comment on it because it seems like inside
baseball and not a big deal. But today the Washington
Times
reported on the incident:
Five students belonging to the school's Progressive Student
Alliance were given an undetermined amount from the
university's student activities fund - from fees assessed to
students - to drive to Washington, bunk with friends and
participate in the National Equality March last Sunday.
Thousands of participants marched from the White House to the
Capitol to support gay rights.
[...]
Dennis Brown, spokesman for the university, did not answer
questions from The Washington Times about why one of the
nation's pre-eminent Catholic institutions approved the trip,
although he did e-mail a brief statement saying the PSA
sponsored the journey. And in a short phone conversation, he
said the PSA only needed approval from a faculty adviser to
spend money on the trip.
William Dempsey, the head of Project Sycamore, which is a Notre
Dame watchdog alumni association with an enormous mailing list,
told the list that, regarding the topic, "the response I have
received from the University is so patently evasive as to be an
embarrassment."
Of course it's in the university's best interests simply to evade
on this one, and dodge the p.r. flack. As I said, it's not a big
deal, and they can probably get away with it by simplying waiting
it out. But the principles in question are very clear cut: there
is no real middle ground between the university's Catholic
position and the aim of the progressive group. This raises two
points.
1. Notre Dame clearly didn't learn anything from their
commencement debacle. They have tried to take some steps toward
healing the rift with conservative/orthodox Catholics, such as
having the president, Fr. John Jenkins, announce that he will
attend this year's march for life in DC. But this most recent
mini-scandal shows that they are still too wary of offending the
liberal constituencies' sensibilities to throw the orthdox
faction even the smallest bone.
2. The fact that there's not really a way for the administration
to spin this at all points to the inherent contradiction between
"gay rights" and religious freedom. The university cannot make
the case that the PSA students were in DC for any reasons
possibly consonant with university policy because, as the
Washington Times article puts it, "The Roman Catholic
Church has taken one of the strictest stands against homosexual
acts of any Christian denomination, calling such acts sinful and
homosexual desires "disordered.'" In the case of students
protesting for the state to legitimize what the Church perceives
as "sinful," there is no way for Notre Dame to claim that there
is a common ground position or an opportunity for "dialogue," as
they tried with President Obama at commencement.
The larger point is that there is an inevitable conflict between
Catholics' (and Christians' generally) freedom of religion and
legal gay marriage. From the evidence it seems that Catholics
have been upfront about this. Even Notre Dame reluctantly asserts
policies that admit of no common ground with gay marriage
advocates (even if they don't uphold those policies).
topics:
Notre Dame, Gay Marriage
