I’ve got a whole new respect for professional teachers and professors. CCU was gracious enough to provide us with a schedule which included 9 classroom presentations. I ended up presenting for 300 min. in one day to classes with 30-60+ students. We arrived at 8am and were greeting by a line of handshakes and smiles; each rider was paired with two hosts, one student and one staff member. During a breakfast provided by the school, we spoke with administration about those things which we agree upon and those things which we do not. The president addressed the elephants in the room: the fact that CCU had initially been very unhappy about our announced visit and yet over time they had come to the understanding that Christ would welcome visitors and did listen to what people had to say. The other elephant was that we were present because we felt that CCU’s policy was one of the worst and most discriminatory out of all the schools we’d visited.
At 9:25am I began with 3 other riders to teach a new testament class; afterwards the professor immediately e-mailed me letting me know that we did a GREAT JOB and that students asked him if he agreed with everything we had said; he told them he’d been with his wife for over 41 years because they had not agreed on everything. A student told him that she had completely changed her viewpoints about homosexuals and he hugged her. I felt bad for my hosts who had to sit through 300 min. of repeat presentations without much time for us to get to know each other. We did attend a praise and worship chapel which was filled with wonderful music. The day felt VERY productive, yet the most exhausting one so far.
The next morning we held a press conference at the North Gate of the United States Air Force base. Many community members attended and we clothed them in blue “end religious-based oppression” tee-shirts. Together we drove to the chapel on base and 10 people stood in a vigil line with tape over their mouths representing the 10,000 people whose voices have been silenced by their discharge since the 1993 inception of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” DADT is a government sanctioned discrimination and is based on the untruth that neither society nor soldiers are ready to see openly gay people in the military. A Gallup poll in 2003 showed that 79% of Americans were in support of gay/lesbian/bisexual people in the military. One of the riders held an oversized poster board check made out to the U.S Department of Defense for 364 million dollars which is the amount of money tax payers have spent to replace the 10,000 gay discharges since 1993, which includes 60 Arabic/Farsi translators and 300 medics which would be very helpful in Iraq right now.
Katie Higgins, equality rider, spoke, “Who wants to sign this check? I don’t want to sign this check, do you? My father and grandfather served in the military and this money had been used to insure that I cannot follow in their footsteps and serve my own country. Do you, Commandant, wish to sign this check? Or perhaps Pres. Bush would like to sign it? Are there any cadets here who would like to sign it? Why are you walking away from me, is it because you do not want to sign this check?” She was arrested along with 10 other riders and community members for attempting to speak out about the myths and facts concerning gays in the military.
The rest of us stayed and spoke with cadets all day; some even paid for our lunch. Everyone that I talked to either held the view that DADT is a ridiculous policy, especially since we are the only country besides Turkey in all of NATO to not allow openly gay people in the military, or else others were open to discussion with us about the issue. The USAF flat-out lied to all media, saying that we had broken agreements with them not to make speeches or pass out literature, which we had never agreed to. They also denied that anyone was arrested, saying our group had only been detained; however when you’re handcuffed, processed, charged with a fine of disorderly conduct, and given a court date I don’t know how you don’t call that being arrested.
