Posted Feb 04, 2015 by Michael L. Brown

Perhaps you didn’t hear about this since it happened in Canada, but a Christian university has been informed that its law degrees will not be recognized because the school holds to biblical standards of marriage and sexuality. In other words, in the name and spirit of gay activism, the state has said to an accredited, recognized institution, “You shall not practice law.”

Is this coming to a college or university near you?

On a regular basis, we hear the latest horror stories of gay activists targeting Christian businesses, and on a regular basis, the state is siding with the gay activists to the point that now, it is the state attorneys general who are bringing charges against these Christians.

On Tuesday, it was announced that “An Oregon administrative law judge ruled on Jan. 29 that the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa did, in fact, discriminate in 2013 when they declined to provide a wedding cake for a lesbian couple because it would have violated their Christian beliefs against same-sex marriage.”

The bakers could potentially be fined $200,000 for holding to their Christian convictions. $200,000!

Can you imagine a Jewish photographer being fined $200,000 for refusing to shoot a wedding on the Sabbath?

Can you imagine a Muslim caterer being fined $200,000 for refusing to provide pork for a party?

For that matter, can you imagine a lesbian printer being fined $200,000 for refusing to print flyers for a church that said: “Leviticus 18:22: Homosexuality Is Not OK”?

Yet today, the state will come after you if you simply decline to do something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, something that even President Obama claimed to oppose just a few years back.

Today, you can be a beloved, deaf, African-American woman and be targeted by the very school from which you earned your Ph.D. and which you have served faithfully for many years simply because you signed a petition saying that you should be able to vote on the definition of marriage.

Today, you can be a gracious, caring white grandmother – a florist! – and be threatened with the loss of your entire livelihood simply because you politely declined the request to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex “marriage.” (With tears she told one of my friends, “They’re trying to take everything from me.”)

What America is learning now is something some of us have been shouting for the last 10 years: Those who came out of the closet want to put us in the closet.

This aggressive, intolerant activism could be coming to a business or school near you.

As Mark A. Kellner wrote on Jan. 30, “The travails of a Canadian Christian university’s quest to establish a law school may reverberate in the United States as conflicts over legalizing same-sex marriage continue, some educators say.”

Kellner explains that, “At issue is whether religiously affiliated law schools with honor codes restricting student conduct to heterosexual marriage could trigger challenges to either a school’s accreditation or the ability of graduates to sit for bar exams, or both.”

And so, “While religiously affiliated law schools in the United States can enforce honor codes, the American Bar Association also requires the schools it accredits not to discriminate in admissions on the grounds of sexual orientation.”

What then happens to a Christian law school that requires its students to hold to biblical standards of marriage and sexuality when those standards are considered “discriminatory” by the American Bar Association?

Said Rena M. Lindevaldsen, interim dean of Liberty University’s Law School, “It is a concern for the future.”

Said Michael Peffer, a law professor at Trinity International University in Santa Ana, California, “We definitely have a concern with the direction of the discussion in our society which seeks to exclude the Christian viewpoint from the marketplace of ideas.”

The operative word is concern.

Years ago, a seminary professor told me that his school could lose its accreditation if it didn’t change its views on homosexuality.

His attitude?

If we lose our accreditation, so be it, but under no circumstances will we rewrite the Bible to accommodate our accrediting agencies.

Of course, compromise is not an option, and his attitude is the only one a truly Christian educator could have.

But can we really afford to have a situation in which our Christian law schools cannot produce recognized lawyers – or perhaps, one day, recognized teachers or doctors?

Certainly not.

This means that we must push back against the intolerance and discrimination and injustice of gay activism.

And while we know that there are times when the church must serve God and society by going underground, that time is not now here in America, which means that now is the time to strengthen our resolve to do what is right.

I believe 2015 is the year of pushback and that the gay bullying will backfire. And so, while we reach out to every individual who identifies as LGBT, recognizing that the vast majority of them are not aggressive activists, we absolutely, firmly, resolutely resist the onslaught of gay activism on our society, determined to be a holy counterculture movement that will reclaim the moral ground that has been taken out from under our feet.

Can we do anything less?

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