12/10/2022
Calling driving a student to su***de "being mentally challenged within the boundaries of law and campus policy" is both horrifying and a remarkably clear way of summarizing both the situation at hand and the general response of Redeemer: if you are not happy being being oppressed for being a q***r student on campus, leave: it is our right to oppress you here.
Why does Redeemer have this "right"? The Reformed Christianity of Redeemer University, like religion of every form, uses mystical ideas to obscure the real nature of human relations and society. In hiding the real nature of human relations, such ideas can often be extremely useful to the capitalist class by acting as a veiled or open defence of capitalist oppression and exploitation. It is for this reason that Redeemer's long-standing practices lie "within the boundaries of law" under capitalism.
We can see the effects of similar reactionary ideas in the US, with recent attacks on abortion rights and a wave of transphobic legislation, violence, and slanders against trans and other q***r people: a generalized push to ramp-up oppression based on gender, sexuality, and the bourgeois family - these same reactionary ideas appearing in religious form.
Just this: the capitalist class allows the church to run a University, sanctioned by Ontario law, based on ideas which oppress LGBTQ people with impunity - the tragic results are clear. There's no reason any student should have to face being demeaned and marginalized by their school, or anywhere else in public life. That religious ideas are allowed by the capitalist class to have a place in the public sphere is an indictment of them and their system.
