Baylor lifts ‘homosexual acts’ ban
University revises its sexual conduct policy after student, alumni appeals
In the 1990s, Eddie Dwyer, who chaired the religion department at Baylor University, wrote about how he and his wife “passed from a night of prejudice into a day of enlightenment” after learning their son was gay.
Dwyer, who taught the New Testament to generations of Baylor graduates in nearly four decades at the university, dove into the Bible’s references to homosexuality and was convinced that “God does not judge a person on the ground of his or her inborn nature.”
“God measures an individual by the kind of person he or she is and by the quality of the life that person lives,” he wrote in a paper he self-published in the mid-’90s that was later picked up by organizations such as the progressive Alliance of Baptists.
The day of enlightenment Dwyer wrote about wouldn’t dawn for the world’s largest Baptist university for another two decades. After years of appeals from students, alumni and others, Baylor has lifted a longstanding ban on “homosexual acts.” The school revised its sexual conduct policy, dropping the ban on gay sex to “state more plainly the expectations of the university,” a Baylor spokeswoman said Tuesday.
It was a quiet but meaningful step for Baylor, which at times has been slow to change with the world around it.
“The policy change re-
flects the administration catching up with the campus culture, which is significant, but the tail is wagging the dog here,” said Daniel Williams, a legislative specialist and field organizer for Equality Texas, an LGBT advocacy group. “Like the rest of the nation and the state of Texas, Baylor is evolving. It’s not as if Baylor just hoisted the rainbow flag and started leading the pride parade or anything, but it’s a small, administrative step that’s catching up with the reality of student life.”
Baylor, a private school and the state’s oldest university, didn’t lift a ban on dancing on campus until the mid-1990s. That decision came six years after students called on leaders to change the rule so they didn’t have to party at off-campus bars. The school continues to ban alcohol on campus or at university-related events.
Baylor’s previous policy called “homosexual acts” a misuse of “God’s gift,” along with sexual abuse, sexual harassment, sexual assault, incest and adultery. To some, the policy was a blemish on the school’s reputation, casting it in a harsh light, including a perennial spot on the Princeton Review’s list of the country’s “most LGBT-unfriendly campuses.”
Future generations
Mike Herrington, who graduated from Baylor in 1964 and took Eddie Dwyer’s New Testament course, said the atmosphere at the college and his religious upbringing left him confused about his sexuality for decades. Herrington married a woman after college and had three children. After years of reflection and therapy, he came out at the age of 57.
Scrapping the ban is a “very, very positive” move by Baylor that will help future students, said Herrington, now 73 and living in Fort Worth with his husband of 14 years, Charlie Hardy.
Students have called on administrators to update the policy for years. In 2013, the student government voted to change the policy, but then-student body President Wesley Hodges vetoed the motion. Hodges did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The school’s updated policy, approved by Baylor’s board in May, is more vague than its last one. It says the university will be guided by “the biblical understanding that human sexuality is a gift from God.” Sex, the policy says, “is to be expressed in the context of marital fidelity.”
Same-sex marriages were not legally recognized in Texas when the new Baylor policy was adopted, but many same-sex couples have married since the Supreme Court ruled June 24 that state bans on such unions were unconstitutional.
A statement on sexuality on Baylor’s website still discourages students from “deviating” from the “biblical norm.” Baylor students, the statement says, “will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”
Baylor has long been a difficult place for gay students to attend, said Paul Dwyer, Eddie Dwyer’s son, who inspired his father’s paper. Paul Dwyer said he remembers the difficulty of trying to come out at the school, where a dean at the time would randomly enter classes to announce she had a list of “known homosexuals” that the university was watching. The ban on “homosexual acts” meant the school could expel those students or pull their scholarships.
In her book, released last year, WNBA player Brittney Griner, a former Baylor basketball star who is a lesbian, said the school’s policies made it hard to feel proud of her university.
“I would love to be an ambassador for Baylor, to show my school pride, but it’s hard to do that — it’s hard to stand up and say, ‘Baylor is the best!’ — when the administration has a written policy against homosexuality,” Griner wrote in the book, “In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court.”
She wrote: “I’ve spent too much of my life being made to feel like there’s something wrong with me. And no matter how much support I felt as a basketball player at Baylor, it still doesn’t erase all the pain I felt there.”
‘I love Baylor’
In their decades in Waco, Eddie Dwyer, who died in 2004, and his wife Velma, who died last year, became unofficial counselors for gay students at Baylor.
Herrington said he still has pride in his school — “I love Baylor,” he said, “You could almost put that in capital letters” — largely because of the accepting people he met there, like the Dwyers.
The Dwyers would have been pleased with the move to drop the ban, Paul Dwyer said. But they likely wouldn’t have thought it was enough.
“He would say that it’s a baby step,” Paul Dwyer said about his father. “He would hope for a lot more. He would want total acceptance from the Baylor campus.”