News
2006-04-21
Georgia Tech
student sues for right to be antigay
Effort part of
growing movement to allow religious intolerance of
gay people.
A Christian
A Christian
student at the Georgia Institute of Technology is suing
the school for the right to be intolerant of gays. Ruth
Malhotra, 22, filed suit last month with a Jewish
classmate in the hopes of overturning Georgia Tech's
ban on antigay speech, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Malhotra, chair of the Atlanta university's
College Republicans, believes she should be able to
express freely her religious views opposing
homosexuality, although what she considers freedom of
expression is seen as harassment by others. In 2004
she sent a letter to a gay student activist that
described the campus's gay rights group Pride Alliance as a
"sex club...that can't even manage to be tasteful," adding
that it was "ludicrous" for the university to fund the
group. Malhotra was later reprimanded by the dean.
She also raised the administration's ire when
she protested a school production of The Vagina
Monologues by displaying a sign that condemned
feminism, part of which she was forced to paint over.
"Whenever I've spoken out against a certain
lifestyle, the first thing I'm told is, 'You're being
intolerant, you're being negative, you're creating a
hostile campus environment,'" Malhotra told the Times.
Her suit against Georgia Tech, filed by the
conservative legal group the Alliance Defense Fund, is
part of a growing campaign by the Christian right to
invalidate all kinds of common tolerance initiatives at
schools and businesses across the country,
including diversity training promoting the acceptance
of gays and lesbians, speech codes,
and antidiscrimination protections. The goal is to
eliminate all policies protecting LGBT people from harassment.
The argument of groups like the Christian Legal
Society, which recently formed a national group
dedicated to challenging such policies in federal
court, is that by preventing discrimination against gay
people, conservative Christians are then discriminated against.
"Christians are going to have to take a stand
for the right to be Christian," said the Reverend Rick
Scarborough, a leading evangelical. (The
Advocate)
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