This is a guest opinion column

This week, student reporters at The Crimson White revealed that The University of Alabama tacitly endorsed discrimination against its own LGBTQ students by a conservative campus organization. The group, who call themselves “Young Americans for Freedom” (YAF), refused to adopt the university’s standard non-discrimination policy required for all campus organizations.

Instead, they insisted that under the First Amendment, they reserved the right to discriminate against their classmates on the basis of “gender identity, gender expression, [or] sexual identity.” Abandoning students and alumni like me, university administrators acquiesced, providing the group “an exception to [the] required non-discrimination clause.” The president of YAF, Trenton Buffenbarger, immediately began to rally other student groups to eliminate non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students.

When I first visited The University of Alabama as a high school senior in 2013, the student tour guide used a slur – as a “joke” – when we passed a table set up by the Queer Student Association. It didn’t get better. A university-provided alcohol awareness training warned that excessive drinking could result in your “worst nightmare” coming true, before cutting to a jumpscare of two men waking up in bed together. Everybody laughed. My statistics professor used our lesson on “correlation” to hint that queer identities might actually be a form of mental illness. And I can’t even count how many times strangers called me a variety of unprintable homophobic insults over the years.

When I was a student, at least there was one space on campus that students like me could turn to: the Safe Zone, a small but incredible LGBTQ community center on campus. But university administrators shuttered Safe Zone alongside the Black Student Union at the beginning of this school year. And now this.

It is a familiar, if disappointing, story. The University of Alabama’s first LGBTQ student organization, the Gay Student Union (GSU), was formally recognized in September 1983. But it took a fight.

When queer students began the process of registering the GSU, none other than – you guessed it – Young Americans for Freedom launched a vicious opposition campaign. Describing their classmates as “sick pervs” who should face criminal punishment for being gay, the group threatened to sue both The University of Alabama and the individual queer students who were organizing the GSU.

After the university finally recognized the Gay Student Union in September 1983, Young Americans for Freedom displayed a poster at Get on Board Day – The University of Alabama’s annual student organization fair – reading: “How does YAF spell relief? AIDS.” Our mass death was their punchline.

As a University of Alabama graduate who has gone on to attend Stanford Law School, I know that the “Young Americans for Freedom” have a juvenile understanding of the First Amendment.

But pretending that this is about the law intellectualizes and distracts from the heart of what is actually at stake: being a decent person.

Pitching a fit about your “right” to discriminate against people who are different from you just isn’t good raising. It reflects a stunted, airless, incurious worldview.

It’s ugly.

The irony is that the “Young Americans for Freedom” stand for anything but their namesake – what draws them together is a shared inability to conceive of or tolerate anyone having freedom besides themselves. Queer and trans people across Alabama are, in important ways, more free than they can imagine.

Often at great personal risk and cost, we insist upon being fully ourselves. We are mothered by necessity and invention to make our own ways through the world. We choose our families. We cut against the grain. We dance and make beauty in the face of a world that wants us dead. We refuse to disappear.

The students who are in Young Americans for Freedom today are no different than their predecessors. They have no new ideas, just the same strange hatred and fixation on LGBTQ people. The truth is that the world is so much bigger and more interesting than the “Young Americans for Freedom” assume. So is Alabama. I hope that they realize that someday.

But in the meantime, university administrators should not give them a hall pass to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Trans and queer people have always been a part of Alabama, and we always will be. At a time when our trans siblings in particular face rising hostility, we – all LGBTQ people and our allies – must hold together and speak out whenever we see nonsense like this. The issue is not that LGBTQ people would even be interested in joining these students’ club (I can assure you, we’re not). The issue is that discrimination is wrong, and the university should not stomach it.

Dana Sweeney is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford Law School. He graduated from The University of Alabama with a Bachelor of English in 2017. Originally from Camden County, Georgia, he lived in Alabama for more than a decade before attending law school.