"Student at Catholic college called into Title IX meeting after he criticized drag show"

thecollegefix.com

"A student at a Catholic university was called into a meeting with the school’s Title IX coordinator this week after speaking out against the university’s cross-dressing drag shows, claiming that they represent 'an assault on the dignity of the human person and the divine gift of ordered sexuality.'

In his column in The Carroll News, Declan Leary said the Jesuit-run John Carroll University was providing 'deviant entertainment' for 'misguided young people' by sponsoring the annual event where men dress as women.

'It is a terrifying testament to the decay of our faith and our university that, throughout the approval process for this event and the six years for which it has now continued, not a single person in a position of authority stood up (or at least stood with sufficient strength) to suggest that perhaps such a flagrant celebration of sexual perversity might just be wrong,' Leary wrote.

Following an article at Cleveland.com detailing the 'uproar' that resulted from Leary’s column, The College Fix reached out to Leary via Facebook message. Leary informed The Fix during an interview that, after the column’s publication, the school’s Title IX coordinator, Eric Butler, had requested a meeting with both him and Olivia Shackleton, the editor-in-chief of The Carroll News.

Leary said the Title IX meeting was requested in response to the article...

Leary said many of the responses to his column have been 'very angry.'

'The progressive students who have the support of the institutional power here have been very aggressively calling for me to be silenced and attempting to discredit me and my writing,' he told The Fix. 'Their message is essentially that my column is hate speech because it attacks their beliefs, and that the university should not allow someone like me to speak out.'

Leary provided The Fix with nearly a dozen letters The Carroll News has received since his column ran, many of which accused Leary of promoting 'hate' or 'hate speech.'

He denied the charges. 'I wholeheartedly support the welcoming and care of individuals on our campus who do not espouse or live by Catholic teachings on sexuality, morality and human nature, but I believe strongly that a Catholic university should not compromise Catholic teachings in order to accommodate these people’s disagreement or even their discomfort,' Leary said...

In his article Leary wrote:

The Jesuits and their progressive allies … seek to redefine our nature in order to conform to the culture of sexual perversion, instrumentalization and commercialization which has so ravaged the human soul and body. We cannot be immoral, they seem to be saying, if we redefine our morals to justify our sins. This cannot be the solution. …

In his interview with The Fix, Leary stated: 'The best way to include these people is to show them the full and true teaching of Christ and His Church. We do them no service and show them no love in embracing a culture of sin which has been mistaken for identity.'..

Jayme Stayer, a Jesuit priest and a professor at the university, told The News at the time: 'I’m scandalized by the homophobia implicit in [Jacobson’s] question. The identity of homosexuality, as the Catholic Catechism makes abundantly clear, is not a sin. To assume LGBTQ persons or their allies are sinful because of their identity is both naïve and uncharitable.'

In his column earlier this month, Leary said that the Jesuits on the campus are 'not who they say they are.'

'It is time for John Carroll University either to radically alter its actions and its character, or to admit the obvious and unfortunate truth that it is no longer Christian,' Leary wrote."