APA censures Calvin College for anti-gay affiliation

A mildly livid Roy Alden Atwood, Ph.D., New Saint Andrews College’s first president and a founding member of the College’s board and faculty, writes in "Philosopher high priests excommunicate Calvin College" (On Higher Education, February 10, 2010):

The philosopher kings have become the philosopher high priests of a new orthodoxy. Academic freedom no longer includes religious freedom for the members of the American Philosophical Association. The APA’s high priests have declared Calvin College heretical for not embracing their new homosexual dogma. The APA has the audacity to claim Calvin is engaged in “a most egregious form of discrimination” when it is their own new priestly power mongering that is forcing an utterly novel orthodoxy on the scholarly association members for its own political ends. In this Brave New Academic World, secularists are working overtime to make Christian orthodoxy the new social and political heresy and to declare sexual perversion the new confession of faith. Another case of “Repressive Tolerance.”

According to the report from Inside Higher Ed, the American Philosophical Association singled out Calvin College for punishment using the association’s new pro-gay rule on APA job listings. Calvin, whose supporting denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, is fairly ”tolerant” on the homosexual question compared to many other evangelical denominations, was no doubt targeted because Calvin has long been a powerhouse in philosophical circles. Nick Wolterstorff [now retired from Yale] and Alvin Plantinga [now retired from Notre Dame] are two extraordinarily prominent American philosophers who once taught at Calvin and led the APA. This secular academic power play is likely intended to threaten and punish any and all Christian academic institutions that refuse to embrace secularism and neo-pagan sexual mores. The Sodomite-homosexual lobby has been putting increasing pressure on Christian institutions, whether through the radical SoulForce protests on Christian campuses or through professional association agitations like the APA’s. Calvin College’s prominence among evangelical and Reformed colleges and its leadership in academic circles generally has apparently made it a prime target for testing such coercion and challenging religious freedom in the academy. Homosexuals must figure that if they can whack Calvin into submission through such tyrannical means, they’ll eventually be able to force every Christian college or university to bow the knee toward Sodom. (emphasis added)

[HT to E.E.]