Lies, deceit and Christians
The Evangelical Christian Union have this week filed a “Letter before Action” with the Students’ Guild of the University of Exeter.
My position within X-Net (for those who don’t know, the online student media for Exeter University) has forced upon me the pure facts surrounding the issue. This is essentially a good thing as it has meant that our News team has been able to cover the story without bias, however, other news websites have not been so fortunate.
Interestingly, it seems that almost all of the websites covering the story are Christian news sites. Not particularly unexpected, however, it seems that almost all of the reporting of this story by Christian news sources either manipulate the facts or get the story almost entirely wrong.
In fact, the most balanced and in fact correct coverage I could find on this issue, beyond X-Net of course, was the BBC News coverage.
Not only are news sources getting the facts wrong but the Exeter ECU themselves don’t seem to know what’s going on. During the recent referendum over the final name, the president of the ECU, James Harding, was interviewed by our News Editor, Kathryn Nott. Some of his initial statements were flat out lies; at one point stating “It is a myth that the Christian Union are affiliated to the UCCF”. After phoning the UCCF, we confirmed that they most definitely are affiliated. To which we got an apology and an excuse: “I forgot that we were affiliated to the UCCF”.
Yeah, we believe you.
Couple this with the inaccurate reporting of various Christian news sites and I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that large Christian organisations will only promote virtues such as equality and morality when it benefits them. So, just like any other organisation really.
I for one sincerely hope that the Students’ Guild don’t buckle under the legal pressure being mounted on them by the ECU, after all, it should be fairly obvious to them that they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.
Lies, deceit and Christians by Nicholas Telford, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England License.
December 25th, 2007 at 15:31
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