Duquesne University panel to study gay issue
Should school back gay-straight alliance?Tuesday, October 18, 2005
By Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Seven months after a Duquesne University sophomore said he was rebuffed in efforts to form a gay student organization on the Catholic campus, the institution's president is asking a special panel to study the idea.
A committee of administrators, faculty, students and members of Duquesne's founding religious order is weighing the impact of a group that, while not unprecedented at a Catholic university, poses uncomfortable issues nevertheless. The church's position is clearly against homosexual sex, but the church also teaches that gay people, like all individuals, must be treated with respect, campus officials said.
"This is an issue that is potentially polarizing, and that's why it's important for us to be deliberative about it," Duquesne President Charles Dougherty said in an interview.
In the weeks after Matthew Pratter said his attempt to form a gay/straight student alliance had been turned down by campus authorities he would not identify, about 120 faculty and staff signed petitions urging the administration to reconsider. But Duquesne leaders insisted as those petitions circulated in April that they could not have evaluated the idea, much less rejected it, because neither Mr. Pratter nor anyone else had formally proposed such a group.
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