Private Christian university denies request to hold LGBTQ event on campus, organizer says

A support group for LGBTQ people at Trinity Western University says it has been denied permission to hold a storytelling event on campus, prompting members to move it elsewhere.

The event was to be organized by One TWU, a group comprised of Trinity Western students, alumni, faculty and members of the public who are either LGBTQ or allies.

The group says it will host the event at Fort Langley Community Hall on March 3, after administrators at the private Christian university in Langley, B.C., rejected a request to hold the event on campus, a reversal of previous decisions.

Group co-director Carter Sawatzky, who also studies English literature at the university, says administrators allowed the storytelling event to take place on campus every fall since 2014 with the exception of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Sawatzky, this year school administrators said the event cannot happen on campus because One TWU is an "external group," and said the fact that the event was held on campus in the past doesn't mean the same can happen in the future.

CBC News has requested response from Trinity Western University multiple times but hasn't heard back.

University 'doubling down on social conservatism': Advocate

Sawatzky, who uses they/them pronouns, says the school's explanations are disappointing but not surprising, because of what they characterize as the university's increasingly hostile attitude toward LGBTQ people.

They say since July 2019, when the university got a new president, school administrators haven't allowed One TWU to put up posters about its support services or events.

Sawatzky also cites Allyson Jule's resignation from the university's dean of education role last year as an indicator of the school's growing antagonism towards the LGBTQ community — they say the university's senior leadership didn't support Jule's allyship.

"It's a doubling down on social conservatism," they told guest host Gloria Macarenko on CBC's The Early Edition."[It] is part of a wider kind of cracking down on inclusive views over the years."

Community covenant against sex outside heterosexual marriage

Trinity Western University made national headlines in June 2018, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that law societies in B.C. and Ontario have the power to refuse accreditation for the university's planned new law school, based on the university's community covenant.

The mandatory covenant bound students to a strict code of conduct that includes abstinence from sex outside of heterosexual marriage. The majority judgment said the covenant would deter LGBTQ students from attending the proposed law school, and those who did attend would be at risk of significant harm.

Two months later, then-president Robert Kuhn announced the covenant would no longer be mandatory for students admitted to the university from fall 2018 onwards, but he said while it's important to make the university more inclusive, his board of governors would insist on conservative education.

"We will remain a Biblically-based, mission-focused, academically excellent university fully committed to our foundational evangelical Christian principles," Kuhn said in a written statement at the time.

Sawatzky says the university can better serve LGBTQ students by letting the storytelling event happen on campus.

"I know that they have different views around queer people, but it's not their beliefs in God that we're questioning — it's their treatment of queer people.

"This decision to not have us on campus is something that doesn't reflect [the fact that] TWU is made up of good students and faculty who are inclusive, supportive, critical thinkers."