Last summer, Trinity Western University, a private liberal-arts school in B.C. applied to have its law school accredited by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada. Controversy arose within the legal and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities because all students, staff and faculty at the school must adhere to a covenant in which they agree not to engage in “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”
So what’s the harm, you may ask? Why shouldn’t a private university be able to set standards of behaviour for its students? How will anyone else suffer? Well, according to lawyer Clayton Ruby, the covenant in effect creates a “queer quota” in university law schools. Trinity Western law school would add 60 to the 3,547 slots Canadian universities currently have allocated for first-year law students. But, as Ruby says, “If you’re queer, you can’t apply to the extra 60 seats… We find that just to be anathema.”
Read the rest of the Globe and Mail article, here
Read the editorial, here
Read Canadian Atheist’s commentary, here.
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