Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News & World Report, and a frequent guest on State of Belief, has posted an interview with Rev. Gaddy about the White House office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships entitled Critic of White House Faith-Based Office Joins Task Force on Reforming It. Rev. Gaddy says in the inteview that:

I have thought all along it would be best not to have such an office, and I still have that opinion. But if there’s going to be an office, I want to do everything I can to see that it is constitutional in nature and that it operates both legally and in the spirit of protecting the First Amendment’s historic separation between religious institutions and government institutions.

The most dangerous thing to do in Washington these days is to stand between Dick Cheney and a microphone. He’s been talking A LOT, especially in his futile attempt to prove that torture is a good policy. Yesterday he spoke at the National Press Club - mostly about torture, but he also made a revelation on another major issue. The former veep declared:

I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish.

It’s kind of ironic that the most powerful vice-president in American history was apparently powerless to stop his boss, President Bush, from declaring support to amend the Constitution to declare marriage to be a union of one man and one woman. Oh well.

Taken in light of the recent comments from John McCain’s campaign manager (warning of the Republicans becoming a theocratic party), this could be seen as good news for the future of the Republican Party. But, as with every political statement, there is a catch. Cheney also said:

The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don’t support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis.

That’s not so encouraging. It’s the equivalent of saying you supported desegregation without supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Constitution guarantees equal protection to all persons regardless of what state they live in. In fact Congress is specifically authorized to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment through legislation. If marriage equality is left to the states, discrimination will continue linger in corners of this country for decades.

So two steps forward, one step back.

James Madison must be exhausted. The poor guy just can’t catch a break – with all of the government interference in religion (the faith-based initiative-turned-partnership) and religious interference in politics (Propositions 8, 102 and 2), he’s probably been rolling over in his grave nonstop for years.

The latest offense against religious freedom is Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University deciding to kick its chapter of College Democrats off-campus, a decision they announced late last week.

Usually when you hear about a student organization getting kicked off-campus, it’s a Greek that’s had its charter revoked for hazing. At Liberty, it’s apparently the desire for two-sided political discourse that will get you asked to leave.

Liberty University, which shares the conservative Christian views of its founder, Jerry Falwell, didn’t approve the presence of any student group affiliated with the Democratic Party (although College Republicans has been a presence on campus for some time) until this past October, when they recognized a chapter of College Democrats. Recognition was granted on the condition that its members would support neither gay marriage nor abortion – two issues that are major no-nos at Liberty.

The students say they’ve held up their end of the bargain. Unfortunately, Liberty’s powers-that-be have decided that endorsing candidates – something the College Republicans also practice and is in the College Democrats’ constitution, which its president, Brian Diaz, says was approved by the university – who “clearly promoted abortion” violates their agreement, and have revoked their recognition of the student organization.

Legally, Liberty has done nothing wrong. They’re a private institution, and as such they can make whatever decisions they want about student organizations.

But (and let me just insert here that I would be making the same argument if this were a liberal college denying its students a College Republicans chapter) one of the purposes of a college education is to teach you to discuss things – important things, big things, change-the-world things – with your peers. Those who agree with you, and those who don’t. In the real world, your peers aren’t limited to far-right conservatives who vehemently oppose both a woman’s right to choose and the (future, I hope) right of any couple to be married by the government. In the real world, you have to learn how to express your opinion, your reasoning for believing as you do and your rationale for disagreeing with “the opposition” – and be civil about it. (Not to mention that in the ivory tower of academia, rational discourse and the exchange of ideas are supposed to be sacred.)

Liberty has a perfect right to do what they did – but choosing to do so shows their poor sportsmanship, small-mindedness and fear of anything beyond the extremely limited scope of their definition of the norm.