Apparently Georgia Tech senior Ruth Malhotra, who is suing her school for the right to discriminate against gay people, is not alone in her feelings of oppression. According to the 10 April 2006 Los Angeles Times, which reported on the case, sixty-four percent of American adults think that religion is under attack. That seems high, until you consider that this poll—at least as it's presented in the article—does not ask those same American adults how they feel about this supposed attack on religion.

If I had been asked whether I agree with the statement “Religion is under attack in this country,” I probably would have said yes, too. Then I would have continued by saying that maybe the results of that attack will be beneficial, that maybe an attack on religion will help people like Ruth Malhotra realize that there is no logic or reason to back up her position that she has a right to harass gay people.

As recently as two years ago, Ms. Malhotra was herself campaigning for higher standards of political correctness. Specifically, she was demanding that the Georgia senate establish rules requiring her school to respect religious and political beliefs. This seems to put her in the actionable position of either admitting that homosexuality is an inherent quality, which would make her a bigot, or maintaining that it is a choice, like political beliefs, which would make her a hypocrite. Fortunately for her, and for those who support her, arguments based on religion rarely require the same intellectual rigor of other arguments.

The basic, fundamental rule of making any argument is that you have to be able to back up your position with facts, or evidence, or logic. An argument that essentially says, “I'm right because I say that I'm right” doesn't hold water in any kind of academic debate. But this is exactly the kind of argument that has been used by religions (or, more accurately, Churches) for centuries to back up claims that have no basis in fact or logic. So-called “Christians,” like Ms. Malhotra, are able to use the illogical assertions of the Church to provide legitimacy to their personal, often biased, opinions.

But Biblical inerrancy is an outdated notion. Leaps of faith aside, there are basic facts that are incorrect in the Bible, such as the claims that rabbits chew their cud and that insects have four legs (Leviticus 11:6 and 11:23, respectively). If any claim, no matter how incidental or inconsequential, is wrong, the document as a whole cannot be inerrant, and hence cannot be the unimpeachable basis for otherwise unfounded arguments.

As it so happens, Leviticus is the same book that says, “If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” This passage is repeatedly pointed to by people who want to stop gays from marrying, or from joining the military, or from attending college without being continually harassed. And when these people, people like Ms. Malhotra, claim that homosexuality is clearly wrong because the Bible says so, we are expected to just accept it, regardless of what logic and reason tell us about the situation.

The Bible also tells us (in this case Deuteronomy 22:23-24) that if an engaged woman is raped in a city and no one hears her scream, she should be stoned to death for not alerting anyone of the crime. Perhaps there was a time when this was considered a fair reprisal for being raped. But I’m fairly certain that this law would not hold up to today’s more enlightened ideas of decency and justice. Those same standards of social justice should make it equally clear that homosexuality is neither deviant nor an abomination, and that actively harassing people for being gay is neither your right nor your duty as a Christian.

Maybe political correctness has gone too far. Maybe we’re pandering to people’s feelings too much by punishing those with discriminatory views. Maybe it’s a hassle—or, worse, an infringement of the right to free speech—to have to constantly watch what we say for fear of reprisal. But political correctness does have its place. When employed responsibly, political correctness combats the rampant institutional discrimination that has pervaded so much of American society. And while we’re certainly seeing progress on that front, we apparently still have a long way to go when it comes to individual discrimination.

Some may see the Georgia Tech fight as a crusade for free speech against an oppressive and unfair system. But suing a school so that you have the right to harass an entire group of people sounds far more like the actions of the racists and bigots that Ms. Malhotra and others are trying to distance themselves from than those of an oppressed minority.