Today was a good day on the beautiful campus of Montreat College.
We started the day with a tour of the campus of Montreat College and the area around it. The campus is at the hills of the (Application?) mountains and reminded me so much of home, to a point that I found my self missing Arkansas a lot. After our tour, we went into the cafeteria and talked with students. I ended talking to the Chaplin on campus for a long time and it was an interesting conversation. I asked him what he would do if a Gay student came to him and what his response would be. He said that if they did not want to change, he would not say that they should change. However, if they did want to change their orientation, he would help them peruse it. Overall, it was good to know that he was a very nice guy and willing to talk to students.
After talking with students and Steve in the cafeteria, a group of us moved to the Student Center and talked with students there for a long time and had had lunch there. All of the students seemed to be receiving what we were saying, pretty well, which was very comforting to see/feel.
After talking with students for a while in the Student Center, we went to the 2:00 presentation, which was done by our spiritual violence group. The group talked for about an hour about their stories and what spiritual violence is and what it looks like. Then, it was the schools turn to respond.
Let me take this time to talk about how I feel about these responses. The school has 364 days of the year to tell the students their position on this issue. I do not understand why they have all of that time; however still feel it is very necessary to give a response to our presentation. It almost feels like they are afraid of us changing the hearts and minds of students, so they want to be sure to attempt to flush out what we said. Every school so far has had a response to our presentation and it is very interesting… Another interesting things is that we are a group of young adults (between 19 and 28) and we are talking in front of people our age, however it takes professors to respond to thing that a bunch of young adults said? I would love to see students respond at one of these responses and not someone who has studied this for the past 40+ years of their life.
The first person’s response was the standard response to what we say. It was nothing that we don’t hear every day. However, the second person, Paul Owen, had a much different response. While I know that he was not attempting to offend nearly every Equality Ride, he managed to, from what I can hear.
Paul’s response was very special, in that it was not a response to anything that we had said. He had typed up his response before hearing what we had to say (much like the person before him). He spoke a little about what he thought spiritual violence was and he was sure to point out that he did not think that damning a person because of their orientation was spiritual violence (he also mentioned that he supported ex-communicating members of the church for being Queer).
Paul’s responce can be found here.
After he made his first point, he went into this incredible tangent of male supremacy and talked and talked about how women need to be subordinate to men, how they need to know their place in the church and society and all of these terrible, terrible un-relevant things about women and his stance on women.
I wish I could explain how much this upset me. It was completely out of the blue and had nothing to do with our presentation.
No, I take that back. It actually ended up having so much to do with our presentation. It just showed spiritual violence working at full effect. What he was preaching was what people use so much to justify the abuse of women. People have used the Bible in the past (and even to this day) to justify the verbal, mental, physical, and spiritual abuse of women and that was exactly what Paul was doing to everyone in that room.
After hearing him speak, I felt pretty terrible about the visit to Montreat and I am very sorry that I let it do that to me. I come on to these campuses expecting lots of anti-gay things, however I don’t come expecting such blatantly anti-woman remarks and it is still such a pain to hear.
After Paul’s response, some riders and a few students and community members took a hike up a mountian and it was beautiful. Then, we went to an amazing community dinner at a local Unitarian Universalist church, which was amazing. They had an entire table of vegan food and it was delicious! We talked about our day and had a small meet and greet and I think it went pretty well.
During this time, we had a few Montreat College students speak and it was amazing to hear what they had to say. One of the students ‘came out’ as Bi-sexual and we had two other students ‘come out’ as straight allies. They spoke a little bit and both of them started the day/Equality Ride experience being very far from allies. They viewed homosexuality as a sin, love the sinner hate the sin, etc etc. However, after meeting us and doing more research on our goals and messages they now are open and affirming of Queer folk. It was wonderful.
Overall, the day was very good. I am very sad that it had to end in the way it did, however the rest of the day made up for it.
Photography was limited on campus, but as usual, photos can be found here.
Love,
Adam.