But one professor has questioned why the university should be making recommendations to anyone about where they should go to church. “It’s just amazing,” criminology professor Mike Adams told FOX. “It appears to me to be the height of not just silliness, but government waste.”
The university’s LGBTQIA (that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex and allied) Office described the list as a “local resource guide [for] lgbt staff and faculty.”
Amazingly, the compilers of the list could only recommend five churches in Wilmington — a community of over 106,000 residents — that they considered friendly to homosexuals. Among the five were, predictably, a Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Unitarian Universalist congregation, as well as the city’s openly homosexual Metropolitan Community Church.
FOX noted that the guide “follows a manual put out several years ago by the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) that included summaries of how certain religions and denominations viewed homosexuality.”
In 2008 a federal judge ruled that the GIT guide favored some churches over others and ordered all religious references to be deleted.
Travis Barham of the Alliance Defense Fund, which was involved in the Georgia case, said that whether the Wilmington college is “promoting denominations or whether they’re promoting individual churches … that’s not the business of a university.”
In his regular column, published on TownHall.com, Adams wrote that “the stupidity of this list of recommended churches should be self-evident — even to atheists who get gas when they see a cross near Ground Zero.”
Adams safely predicted that the university’s LGBTQIA Office “would never be willing to take the time to come up with a list of churches for people who want to hear the two most important truths about homosexuality” — that it is “unequivocally sinful according to both the Old and New Testaments,” and that “God wants you to avoid homosexuality because He loves you and He knows it will hurt you badly, not to mention end your life prematurely. That is why God gave you free will instead of a gay gene.”
According to the Christian Post, when Dr. Kimberly Cook, chair of the university’s Department of Sociology and Criminology, saw the church list, “she said it could be passed on to students as well. ‘It might be useful for you and your students,’ she wrote in the email to other staff members. ‘Use as you deem appropriate.’”
But Adams recalled that back in 2009, when he sent an e-mail to students that included the observation that they were “endowed with a purpose by their Creator,” Cook filed a complaint with the university’s dean.
The fact that Cook would now endorse a list of “gay friendly” churches put out by the school is particularly galling to Adams. But while there are undoubtedly individuals on campus who are also peeved about the list, “no one will speak up at all because it’s the gay movement, and everyone is terrified of speaking up against the gay movement,” Adams said.
“Adams says that he is currently in the middle of a court battle with UNCW over a promotion that the school denied him five years ago due, in part, to his controversial column and his criticisms of diversity,” reported the Christian Post. “In April, he won a unanimous decision for his first amendment rights in front of a circuit court of appeals.”
