BCM Hosts Conversion Promoting Event

On Saturday Mar. 25 USCA’s Baptist Colligate Ministry (BCM) hosted “A Biblical Conversation on Sexuality and Gender Identity”. For this event they invited Patti Height as their guest speaker.

There was a good turnout for the event although there were only a few university students in the audience, most were members of the community who were in support of the subject. The students reasoning for attending ranged from being interested in seeing a different perspective to simply wanting to hear someone else’s story. There was little support of conversion itself.

Due to the controversial nature of the event students gathered in front of Penland to protest. During their peaceful protest students dressed up, held their personal pride flags and held signs. The protest held around 60 participants.

“ I am here to support everyone in my community, meaning the LGBTQIA+ community, and support anti conversion therapy…We’re all really here to support the community as a whole but specifically the USCA community.” -Summer Burch, student and member of the LGBTQIA+ community

Along with current students, some USC Aiken Alumni attended the event to show their support.

For days leading up to the event there were statements released by staff members providing the stance of USC Aiken, some even providing services for those in the LGBTQIA+ community. This is due to the university being unable to directly decline the event.

“BCM is a registered student organization so they’re allowed to reserve space on campus for free…there is a review of all of the speakers material. If there was violent speech, threats or anything that insights violence we would’ve cut the speaker…could not find one thing that had any reference to these things.” -Dr. Jamel Hodges