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Jerry Falwell Jr., the chancellor of Liberty University, is denying a report that the institution and its students are becoming more liberal. New York magazine reported that opposition to gay marriage used to be a united political belief at the university. But over the last week, while two Supreme Court cases about gay marriage captured national attention, the university was quiet on the issue and some students said that there were a range of opinions on the issue.
But the day after that article ran, Falwell sent a letter to the author of the article, stating that Liberty remains a conservative institution, even if the political mood has changed a bit. "[M]ost of our faculty, staff and students are very conservative politically and theologically. I do not see that changing at all," he write. "For example, in Liberty’s voting precinct, Romney won 93 percent of the vote and that precinct had, by far, the highest turnout in the area. Students still are very much pro-life and pro-traditional marriage just like they have always been and the ones who voted for Romney indicated those two issues were the main reasons they supported Romney over Obama. The only shift I have noticed in recent years has been more support among conservative Christians, especially young ones, for libertarians. In Virginia, only Romney and Ron Paul were on the ballot in the Republican primary and Ron Paul won at the campus precinct. So, if anything, our students are becoming more conservative on the issue of limiting the size and scope of government while remaining conservative on the social issues."
