Baylor University is embroiled in a raging debate over free speech after LGBT students and others tried to stop a conservative blogger from speaking on campus.
Matt Walsh, the popular conservative blogger and podcaster, was invited by the university’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter to speak on campus.
Baylor is a Christian university that was founded by Texas Baptists in Waco.
Mr. Walsh’s remarks were titled “How the Left has set out to redefine life, gender and marriage.”
“It’s not about me, it’s about the message that I’m that I’m bringing,” Walsh said on the Todd Starnes Radio Show. “I want to talk about the sanctity of life – of marriage.”
Posters promoting the speech featured a Communist hammer and sickle against a rainbow flag.
Students are waging a fierce protest – nearly two thousand have signed a petition urging the university to cancel the address.
“This cannot be allowed to take place,” the petition reads. “Please remove this from campus events. For the benefit of all LGBTQ+ students, alumni, and future students, this harmful hate speech must be kept off of our beloved campus.”
Thankfully, the university’s administration did not capitulate to the leftwing mob.
“Our brothers and sisters of the LGBTQ+ community are being oppressed by the hateful speech and rhetoric which is disseminated by Matt Walsh,” student Mackenzie Chandler wrote in a Baylor Lariat column titled, “Hate Speech Has No Place in Christianity.”
“By allowing Young Americans for Freedom to host this fascist, Baylor is necessarily aligning itself with these oppressive views.
The campus newspaper published another column Mr. Walsh a fascist. And one student even bragged about tearing down posters promoting the event.
“Allowing self-described fascists to speak on our campus is not allowing them to exercise their freedom of speech,” student Michael Agapos wrote defending the act of vandalism. “Rather, it is allowing one whose relationship to freedom is already dubious a platform to potentially undermine the authority of the U.S. government and Constitution.”
Clearly, this sort of behavior is unbecoming especially for so-called Christian university students. It sounds to me like Baylor University has become B-I-N-O. Baptist In Name Only.
But even more concerning, it appears there are a good many students who want to turn Baylor University into the Baptist Berkeley.