On March 15, Soulforce's Equality Ride will make a stop at Oakwood University in Huntsville. Soulforce is an organization dedicated to fight religious and political oppression of LGBT people using principles of nonviolence in the traditions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Its annual Equality Ride is a bus tour across the US of young adults attempting to foster dialogue on LGBT issues and confronting colleges and universities it believes are discriminatory against LGBT students.
This won't be the Equality Ride's first visit to Alabama--previous stops in the state include Heritage Christian University, a Church of Christ university in Florence and Samford University, a Southern Baptist university in Birmingham.
Oakwood University is a historically black university owned and operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Seventh-day Adventist Church believes that marriage is only between a man and a woman and that all sexual acts outside of marriage are immoral, so by extension, homosexuals in the church must be celibate. Furthermore, they do not ordain homosexuals. As with many other religious colleges and universities, Oakwood does not require its students to be members of its parent denomination, but does enforce religious based policies on its students. Notably, the student handbook implicitly forbids same sex relations of any kind amongst its student body:
While all consequences or discipline will be redemptive in nature, dismissal or suspension from the University (or lesser action) may result from the commission of any of the following offenses or violations occurring on or off campus:
...
4. Violation of the biblical teaching regarding sexual morality under any circumstances; sexual abuse, date/acquaintance rape, or any form of sexual harassment.
Soulforce is seeking students, alumni, and local concerned citizens to volunteer to help with the Equality Ride visit. For more information, see the Oakwood visit's page.
For more information on LGBT advocacy within the Adventist movement, visit the website of Seventh-day Adventist Kinship.
Originally posted on gayinalabama.com
