FIRE Won

Florida's Indian River Community College (IRCC) has been giving trouble with their local Christian Student Fellowship (CSF) chapter. The CSF was hoping to show the Passion of the Christ on campus. They were denied because it was an "R" rated movie. IRCC then passed a policy that required faculty advisors to attend all meetings of an organization. After FIRE intervened they backed down on faculty requirements and the Passion will be shown this semester.

Thank God. I have mentioned this before, but I was the treasurer for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship for three years while I was at University of Delaware. We didn't have trouble with showing movies, inviting speakers, or any of that. We were conspicuously out of the funding chain for an organization that had 120 members on campus though. If they had tried to pull the "faculty advisor must be present" trick, we wouldn't have been able to do it. We would have had to close up shop and go underground. We had small group bible studies and prayer meetings going on simultaneously all across campus. No one human being could have possibly been at them all.

FIRE seems like a good organization. Its nice to see a civil liberties organization that takes freedom of conscience and religious liberty seriously. The ACLU doesn't, by and large it sees religion as an engine of discrimination not an istitution to be protected.

I know at Delaware we had a lot of concerns about being labeled discriminatory because we didn't want non-christians in the student leadership of a christian campus ministry. They could join and attend all they wanted. Lots did and I had a non-christian guy in my bible study for an entire year. Thankfully it never got as bad as IRCC.

UPDATE: Fire has justed started its own blog: The Torch.