The Graduate Student Council (GSC) of prestigious Stanford University in California (campus shown) has shot down a request for funding from a university group that is planning a pro-marriage conference entitled “Communicating Values: Marriage, Family and the Media.” The Stanford Anscombe Society says that its campus mission is to promote “discussion regarding the roles of the family, marriage, and sexual integrity in the lives of Stanford students both now and after graduation.”
But National Review reported that when the group approached Stanford’s GSC to request $600 in funding for the event, the government group was convinced by campus homosexual organizations that the conference amounted to “anti-LGBT” hate speech. “Over 100 students, many organized by the queer graduate group GradQ, showed up at the GSC meeting on ‘Communicating Values’ and, according to the minutes of the meeting, decried ‘Communicating Values’ as hateful and even dangerous to LGBT members of the Stanford community,” reported National Review.
According to the minutes of the GSC meeting, one student warned that “an event such as this would be a negative event; in schools that have negative events there is a statistically significant increase in suicide.”
Another testified that “public schools cannot deny student group funding based on viewpoint, but enforcing viewpoint neutral policy that denies funding for hate speech is an entirely different ballgame. Even if Stanford was a public university, it would be perfectly legal to deny funding to events that make LGBT community feel unwelcome.”
Among the other comments by students antagonistic toward a group that promotes healthy marriage relationships:
• “ … makes homosexuals on campus feel less than equal to others.”
• “ … this event is to help people better convey hateful messages … the conference is to help better articulate their views, but it’s not better articulating, rather camouflaging discrimination and hateful messages.”
• “ … there is a lot of feeling espousing the view that marriage is between a man and woman is, at the least discriminatory, at worst hate speech.”
• “This event is small and exclusive, this doesn’t make us feel in community welcome, we don’t feel included.”
Among the few voices of reason was one student who pointed out that “in the name of tolerance we are silencing and taking away support from a view that we don’t agree with. These views are out there, [and] we should listen to them. I totally disagree with these people, but we need to hear what they have to say.”
The aggressive pro-homosexual lobby ultimately won the day, and the GSC denied funding for the conference. The next night Stanford’s Undergraduate Senate followed suit by voting to deny the university’s Anscombe Society its request for $5,000 in funding for the group’s overall campus activities.
The Stanford Daily, the university’s student newspaper, noted that despite no university funding the Anscombe Society’s Communicating Values Conference will go on as scheduled, with private parties funding the effort.
The premier campus homosexual group, GradQ, had offered to co-sponsor a conference with the conservative pro-marriage organization in lieu of the planned event, but the Anscombe Society graciously declined, saying its conference could not be replaced. “We really do appreciate GradQ’s willingness to co-sponsor an event, and it’s an offer that we’ve accepted, but we felt that such an offer could not supplant the conference,” said Stanford Anscombe Society President Judith Romea. “We are very eager to co-sponsor events in the future [but such an offer] just cannot supplant the current plans.”
