Pride-flag protest at Christian university graduation part of larger social movement

Dozens of students at a private Christian university in Washington have drawn nationwide attention to their school and its policies on gay and lesbian employees after a protest during their graduation went viral.

A group of graduating seniors at Seattle Pacific University handed Pride flags to interim President Pete Menjares during Sunday's graduation ceremony. Others simply declined to shake his hand, and some told him that he should resign.

Video of the demonstration spread and has been viewed by millions.

It was just the latest in a slew of student actions over several years aimed at taking down Seattle Pacific's policy banning gay and lesbian employees.

Those efforts are also part of a larger fight playing out at Christian schools across the country, including a class-action lawsuit filed last March challenging a religious exemption to Title IX, which protects students in the U.S. from discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.

"For the seniors, it felt like doing something very visible on stage was the only appropriate way to go out," said Laur Lugos, who handed Menjares a letter instead of shaking his hand on Sunday.

In the letter, Lugos, 22, urged Menjares to resign, and vowed to "disrupt and dismantle" ideologies and institutions that keep people from Christ.

Menjares, through a school spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed.

In a short statement, Menjares said "it was a wonderful day to celebrate with our graduates."

"Those who took the time to give me a flag showed me how they felt and I respect their view," he said.

In a statement late last month, the school's board of trustees said it decided against making changes to policies regarding school employees after "a thorough and prayerful deliberation."

The policy continues to reflect "a traditional view on biblical marriage and sexuality, as an expression of long-held church teaching and biblical interpretation," the statement said.

In addition to the graduation demonstration, students have been holding a sit-in protest in Menjares' office every day for the past three weeks, and have told the Board of Trustees that they must resign by July 1 or face litigation.

Lugos, who was among those sitting in this week, said students and alumni were considering suing the trustees for breach of fiduciary duty, saying they have hurt the school's reputation.

The larger fight: Lawsuit challenges Title IX religious exemption

Signed into law in 1972, Title IX was designed to provide women with the same access to education and athletics as their male counterparts at publicly funded universities. The Obama administration issued guidance expanding Title IX protections to LGBTQ students in 2010, a move reversed by then-President Donald Trump and restored by President Joe Biden.

The lawsuit challenging the religious exemption, filed by the Portland-based Religious Exemption Accountability Project, argues that it violates rights of due process and equal protection.

Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, likened the modern fight to religious exemptions cited by schools that once fought racial integration.

Activists had an uphill battle back then but eventually prevailed.

"None of those bans are around anymore," Southwick said. "Somebody had to fight, somebody had to agitate and there were losses along the way but eventually justice and equality were able to prevail."

He commended the student efforts at Seattle Pacific as "brave and bold."

"Social movements like this, they will not be as powerful or legitimate if they solely come from outside forces," he said. "Where the power and legitimacy comes from is when the movement is from within."

Other examples include students at Utah's Brigham Young University holding an unofficial Pride march last June, and students protesting at California's Fresno Pacific University for denying a Pride club earlier this year.

Jay Fratt, whose stepson graduated from Seattle Pacific on Sunday, said he and other parents weren't sure what was going on when some students weren't shaking Menjares' hand and others were handing him Pride flags.

"My whole family was trying to figure out what was going on because it was a bit of a bizarre situation," he said. "It seemed that the students knew what was going on, but most of the crowd were just waiting for their child’s name to be called."

But after learning what the students were demonstrating about, Fratt said they have a good point and questions the university's policy, which he said he didn't know about until this week.

"It does paint Seattle Pacific University in an extreme light – which, we didn’t go to that school for reasons of conservatism in that brand," he said. "It was just a good school."

Lugos said she was also attracted to the quality of the school and its music therapy program, and was encouraged to see the university tout diversity before she enrolled.

"I came from an incredibly loving, accepting and also just a kind of other Christian environment," she said. "And so to step into a predominantly white evangelical, homophobic culture was a shock to me."

As Lugos and her fellow students have been fighting the university's policies, she said they've experienced pushback from other students, including some who've encouraged them to leave the school,  and one incident in which a man delivered a homophobic book to her and fellow student leaders and made a comment she considered threatening.

She said such responses only make the mission clearer.

"I hope that our efforts push through so that we can like actually become a loving and inclusive environment," she said.

Southwick said his group will continue to fight religious exemptions and file Title IX complaints against schools discriminating against its students.

"A lot of these kids grow up in homeschooled, fundamentalist, rural communities," he said. "They don't know anything but what they are told by their fundamentalist ministers and families, and that doesn't make them any less gay. Someone needs to pierce that bubble and tell them, 'You do not need to hate yourself. God loves you. We love you.'"

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: LGBTQ-rights protest at Seattle Pacific graduation targets president