At Jerry Falwell’s Christian College, It’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ on Marriage Equality

If the movement to stop same-sex marriage in its tracks had a spiritual home, it might be in Lynchburg, Virginia, on the sprawling hillside campus of Liberty University. Liberty, after all, is an evangelical megauniversity that was started by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, the fiery right-wing minister who spent a huge portion of his career preaching about the sinfulness of homosexuality. Falwell led the Moral Majority, helped elect Ronald Reagan twice, and gained national notoriety in 2001, when he went on TV and connected the terrorist attacks of September 11th to the prevalence of gays and lesbians in the U.S. And he always meant for Liberty to follow in his arch-conservative footsteps. (Before his death in 2007, Falwell told Liberty students that, if the school ever became liberal after he was gone, they should return to campus and burn it down.)