Tufts President gives protesters the anti-discrimination policy they want
After a 34-hour sit-in at the undergraduate admissions office, members of Tufts Students Against Discrimination (TSAD) left, cheering, "We got our policy, you got Bendetson [Hall]." University President John DiBiaggio released a letter with the exact wording the protesters wanted: "I affirm that the nondiscrimination policy is understood to include such self-acceptance of identity." Here's the decoding of the sentence. TSAD was protesting a decision by the school's student judiciary that Tufts Christian Fellowship (TCF), a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, could remain on campus. TCF claimed (in part) that theoretically homosexuals could serve as leaders of the group so long as they did not approve of homosexual practice. In TSAD's mind, that's a denial of "self-acceptance of identity"—a homosexual person who believes homosexual practice is a sin is apparently not "self-accepting." Or something like that. The shorthand that TSAD members keep using is that "identity and belief are the same." RumorsDaily, a Tufts student site that's had a pretty good history of being right, but still deals largely with conjecture (think Matt Drudge) says another battle between TCF and TSAD may already be brewing. (Tufts Daily, the student newspaper, is pretty slow at getting its stories up, but will eventually have one here.)

Elliott Abrams sticks up for TCF Elliott Abrams, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and, a "somewhat observant Conservative Jew," writes in a column for Beliefnet that Tufts risks being a case study for the exclusion of Christians and observant ...