Changes in Attitude: A new, more civil conversation is emerging with gays and lesbians on evangelical campuses.

[Note: This feature article was published in the July 2012 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

DURING STEVE SLAGG’S freshman year at Wheaton College in Illinois, a gay-rights advocacy group called Soulforce announced that it was embarking on a nationwide bus tour of conservative Christian colleges that had campus policies against homosexuality to facilitate some of the first open conversations about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Wheaton College was one of their stops.

“We were talking a lot on campus about Soulforce and what we were going to do about them,” remembers Slagg about the spring 2006 tour. “It felt like nobody was really aware of the fact that there were people in this community who were gay.”

So Slagg decided to come out. He started with friends and classmates, but he also spoke with campus groups, and he held a meeting on his dormitory floor. He was interviewed in the campus paper, The Record, under the headline “Gay at Wheaton,” and numerous classmates approached him for private coffeehouse conversations around campus.

The pressure and attention grew to be too much, and Slagg quickly receded into normal campus life.

But during Slagg’s senior year, after feeling as though the conversations around homosexuality on campus had not changed, he wrote an essay for a new campus literary journal, The Pub, about being gay at Wheaton. “We exist,” he declared. “The most harmful and pervasive lie I’ve encountered at Wheaton has been that homosexual students either don’t exist at Wheaton or aren’t worth considering. Outrageously enough, I believed this lie for most of my freshman year.”

Romney’s Statements on the ‘Very Poor’ Provide a Great Opportunity

[Note: This blog post does not reflect the opinions of my employer.]

By now you’ve probably heard that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said in an interview with CNN that he was “not concerned about the very poor.” In fact, his full statement was:

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America – the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling, and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.”

 While opposition pundits, TV personalities, and candidates have pounced on this opportunity to attack Romney as an elitist who doesn’t care about the poor, it’s more important to provide constructive and factual evaluations of the former governor’s statements.

For one, Romney’s assumption that “90, 95 percent of Americans” are neither very rich nor very poor is inaccurate. In fact, according to the U.S. Census, the nation’s official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent – or 46.2 million people -- up from 14.3 percent in 2009. The epidemic of poverty in America is far reaching and affects a larger percentage of Americans than the small margin Romney indicated in his statement to CNN. With increased unemployment and a still-difficult economy, more and more American families are becoming the “very poor.”

Heather's Story

A small desk with a laptop, books, and a chair sits in Heather Rude-Turner’s living room in northern Virginia.
Her two young children and even her two dogs know not to touch anything on that desk, no matter how rowdy they get around the house.

“That’s mommy’s desk,” says Heather’s 5-year-old daughter, Naomi.

Why the caution? Because Rude-Turner, 31, has spent the last few years working toward her bachelor’s degree. She graduated in December 2011 with a degree in child psychology, a cause for celebration for her entire family. They know the road to graduation has been longer and more difficult than most.