TL;DR: If a student can&#x27;t be openly and actively gay at your university, then you&#x27;re running an indoctrination camp, not a &quot;place to learn&quot;.<p><i>&gt; There&#x27;s a stark difference between a free and voluntary association of like-minded people and a so-called &quot;safe space&quot;</i><p>No, there defintionally is not... perhaps there seems to be a confusion over definitions.<p>The fact that people want to expand the rules governing a particular safe space into a large sphere doesn&#x27;t change the definition of a safe space.<p>You can take offense with someone wanting to make a classroom into a safe space, but I really don&#x27;t get why any non-authoritarian person would insist on not allowing safe spaces at all.<p>Also, I&#x27;d be surprised if OKWU faculty&#x2F;students&#x2F;alumni don&#x27;t try doing the exact same thing (expanding the boundaries of their safe space) by voting for fundamentalist christian politicians who enforce christian morality on women who use birth control, homosexuals, people who consume alcohol, etc.<p><i>&gt; ...which uses a pretext of &quot;victimization&quot; to capriciously thought control others who simply committed the offense of disagreeing or criticizing.</i><p>What, like kicking someone out of a university when they realize half way through a difficult-to-transfer course of study that they&#x27;re gay? Or that they enjoy square dancing?<p>The harm that fundie universities like OKWU have done to students who disagree ever so slightly with their idiotic version of religion is demonstrable and significant. Your argument that students somehow &quot;should have known better&quot; is, IMO, fundamentally misinformed.<p><i>&gt; And this is evidence of what, exactly?</i><p>That OKWU is a safe space and that safe spaces have <i>always</i> existed, but they usually function to shelter people who are aligned with popular opinion &#x2F; cultural norms. You know, like social norms (e.g., not employing publicly out gay people, looking the other way when transvestites are assaulted, etc.) protecting homophobes from having to knowingly interact with the icky gay people.<p>OKWU is a safe space for people who don&#x27;t want to have to interact with anyone who does not subscribe to their particular brand of nutty American puritan christianity.   It&#x27;s a place where people can be openly homophobic and openly judge other people&#x27;s sexual morality without being socially ostracized like they would be in the real world.<p>Just in case my opinion isn&#x27;t clear by now: Everett Piper is a massive hypocrite who runs a religious commune with strict codes of conduct while also appealing to liberal values. He doesn&#x27;t actually give a shit about free speech or dissenting opinions. It&#x27;s impossible to take someone seriously when they claim universities aren&#x27;t safe spaces while also expelling people for disagreeing with a very particular and very whacky form of christianity.