Gay activists to stage 'Jericho' walk at BYU
Next week, the group will return to BYU with a new plan for publicity — a plan based on a Bible story.
The college-age Soulforce Equality Riders style themselves after the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Their 2007 tour began eventfully last week with eight arrests, six at Notre Dame University, and with an apology from one college president.
The group's BYU game plan includes a six-hour walk around the perimeter of the campus on March 22, a public demonstration meant to recall the story in the Old Testament Book of Joshua about the walls of Jericho.
In the story, God instructs Joshua to have the Israelites march around the city of Jericho once a day for six days, then seven times on the seventh day. The walls, as the song goes, came "a tumblin' down" when the Israelites shouted after they circled it the final time.
An e-mail sent Monday invited Utahns to join the "Walls of Jericho" walk. Organizers said there is no possibility of arrest, which means Soulforce plans to stay off BYU property. Last year, a handful of students joined the Soulforce march and die-in, and two were arrested.
BYU's Honor Code allows gay men and women to enroll at the university and attend in good standing if they do not engage in homosexual conduct or advocate a gay lifestyle.
The Equality Riders, including three former BYU students, say the Honor Code only vaguely defines advocacy. They also say some in the BYU community are intolerant.
"We affirm that some within BYU's walls house the attitudes and actions that lead to an environment of fear and oppression," Monday's e-mail said. "We invite you to walk with us as a peaceful testament that such abuses should end."
The message said the event is neither a protest nor an act of civil disobedience.
Six Soulforce members were arrested for criminal misdemeanor trespass at Notre Dame on Friday as they carried wreaths to a campus memorial for a gay alumnus.
One of those arrested was recent BYU business graduate Mike Cramer.
Two more Equality Riders were arrested Monday at Central Bible College in Missouri. The Soulforce group stood outside the college silently reading Bibles for hours before the two women, who are not gay, stepped onto campus, according to a copyright report on the Web site of the Springfield News-Leader.
The Riders are conducting two simultaneous tours, with one Soulforce bus headed east from Minnesota and one traveling west to visit a total of 32 religious and military colleges and universities that the group believes have intolerant policies.
Wednesday night, the first of the tour, vandals sprayed vulgar graffiti messages on the east bus as it sat in hotel parking lot in Sioux Center, Iowa.
The Riders were in Iowa to visit Dordt College. The college's president welcomed the Riders to campus and apologized for the treatment. Dordt maintenance crews cleaned the graffiti from the bus, according to an online report from the Sioux City Journal.
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com
You can be the first to comment on this story.