May 11, 2007  |  By: ZACH HUDSON  | COMMENTS     

From the very moment they took off, the 50 gay rights activists who hit the road on a tour of private, Christian college campuses with the 2007 Soulforce Equality Ride made headlines.

The second Equality Ride, which kicked off with one bus traveling east and the other traveling west on March 8, came to an end April 26. During that time, riders racked up approximately 90 arrests and thousands of dollars in bail money and court fines, usually for little more than stepping onto the private property of the campuses they visited — though typically after being warned by college officials and local authorities.

The riders, most under age 25, volunteered their time and were not paid for the trip. Each rider was tasked with raising about $4,000 from donations for trip expenses, which included about $80,000 in hotel bills and $30,000 for food, according to West Bus co-director Haven Herrin.

So far, Herrin said the fundraising efforts of the riders and Soulforce had yielded about two-thirds of the $400,000 trip budget.

The riders coordinated each campus visit, some months in advance, and contacted each school on the tour to ask for official permission to enter the campuses and interact freely with willing students and teachers. 

“I think that’s one of the best examples of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Why are the administrators on these campuses so afraid of conversations, of people simply having conversations about a subject they probably disagree on?” asked East Bus rider Joey Heath before the trip concluded.

The riders showed up at each stop armed with information about each school’s policies concerning homosexuality and gay students. 

From the start, the ride, and the reactions of the schools and towns to which it traveled, garnered national attention. Before East Bus riders could set foot on Dordt College’s campus in Sioux Center, Iowa — their first destination — they awakened to find their temporary bus defaced with anti-gay slurs. As the trip rolled on, riders were arrested at stops in nearly every state they visited, including Utah, where they also made one of their greatest achievements, according to Herrin.

Following a March 22 stop at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where rider Kourt Anderson and his mother, Karel Allen, were both arrested for trespassing on the campus, the school revised its policies, which previously called for the dismissal of openly gay students. The school loosened its rules to allow gay students to come out of the closet without fear of official reprisal, but maintained strict chastity requirements for all students.

“While we are not directly responsible for communication with the administration, as we were prohibited from speaking with the administration, I do believe that the students who were a part of those conversations were galvanized by the Equality Ride visits,” Herrin said.

East Bus riders, who included Heath and Robin Reynolds, both from Valdosta, Ga., landed at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., on April 2, and were immediately warned by school officials and a 20-member police squad not to step foot on the school’s property.

After a day of meeting and talking to about 50 students, four riders — Rachel Loskill, Bronwen Tomb, Adam Britt and Jarrett Lucas — read aloud from a prepared statement that asked Covenant College to reconsider its policies prohibiting openly gay students from attending the school. Almost instantly after stepping onto the school’s property, the riders were arrested, then jailed overnight on trespassing charges.

Days before the Covenant College stop, 12 East Bus riders were arrested during a
sit-in demonstration at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. The riders stopped in at the school in protest of school president Albert Moehler’s comments, which advocated eugenic interference with fetuses to prevent children from being born gay.