His parents live on the same property in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, as his father’s brother and his wife, Rep. At home, church, and the Christian schools he attended, he was consistently taught that homosexuality was sinful, and that gay people were ungodly and even criminal. But his father, who had raised him in a deeply conservative Christian environment, told him it was the only university he would pay for his son to attend. ORU wasn’t Andrew Hartzler’s first choice for college. Under a change made by the Trump administration, a university can even request the exemption after being accused of discrimination. To qualify for the exemption, a religious college or university need only notify the Department of Education of how complying with the law’s nondiscrimination provisions would conflict with its religious tenets. But none of these protections exist for an estimated 100,000 LGBTQ students at over 200 religious colleges and universities that have taken advantage of the law’s expansive religious exemption. Since the mid-2010s, as courts and policymakers began interpreting “sex” in federal civil rights statutes to include gender identity and later, sexual orientation, these protections have expanded to LGBTQ students. I will not be united in marriage other than the marriage between one man and one woman.”Īt any other non-religious college, such a pledge would be a violation of a 1972 federal law that protects against sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. Like all students, Hartzler had signed a pledge: “I will not engage in or attempt to engage in any illicit, unscriptural sexual acts, which include any homosexual activity and sexual intercourse with one who is not my spouse.
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Big Chicks and Tweet are hulking, living art projects-experiments in business and community.Hartzler, who is gay, did not raise his hand, acutely aware that at ORU, being gay is an honor code offense punishable by expulsion. Those hours forced her to stop making art, “but that’s fine,” she says, and it sounds like she means it. And like that, she was working 80-hour weeks again. In 2003, long after Big Chicks stopped keeping morning hours, Fire opened an all-day restaurant next door, Tweet. She’d open her bar in the morning, when the old guys would come in, and work a shift at the Loading Dock at night. In the early years she worked 80-hour weeks. When the bar that became Big Chicks came up for rent, she had just enough money to grab it. She’d eyed the art deco terra-cotta buildings on the North Side forever-it’s what she used to draw. She knew she never wanted to borrow money, and she knew she wanted to be prepared. She started saving, though she didn’t know what for.
bar.” That’s when she decided to, as she says, start participating in capitalism. In 1984 she landed that job at the Loading Dock-an “all-consuming, very exhausting 5 a.m. For ten years, she hustled, making drawings and prints, tending bar, working catering gigs, manning the temporary tattoo stand at street fairs. She studied art at UIC and made a place for herself in Chicago’s art scene. Nothing could be beat out of Fire she’d just fight through. “It’s called safety,” she says.įire peeking through the windows. Did that make sense? I’m having a hard time articulating myself, I can’t find the words. When I was here, I felt like a citizen, of the city and of the bar. Did she know what I meant? I felt calmer there, and maybe a little hopeful-like Chicago, a city that could be so backward, could be as good as I thought it was. Now I’m telling her how I used to feel those nights at Big Chicks, how I wanted to become part of the place, to be bolted to the wall like the photographs. I tried to look tough, like I owned the place, like the floor was mine. I philosophized, drunkenly, that nobody gets to live with art like this nobody gets to flirt and make out and spill beer in a museum. I sucked on a cigarette (this was back when people still smoked inside) I exhaled on the Diane Arbus photograph above me. But at Big Chicks-and only at Big Chicks-a bear could not intimidate me. Sometimes it seemed like it was only bears in the place-muscle bears, cubby bears, ginger bears, otters. Cruising the trans boys, the black girls, the grizzly raising eyebrows at me from the bar. I’ve been that boy leaning against the wall, lightheaded, cheap gin in my glass. She trails off, but I spent ten years of the aughts going to Big Chicks-I can fill in the rest.