Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trinity Western University has a Community Covenant that only permits sexual minorities to attend at considerable personal cost to their dignity and sense of self-worth. All student and staff applicants to TWU are required to sign this covenant pledging not to engage in same sex intimacy. On April 11, 2014, the Law Society of British Columbia accredited TWU’s law degree program despite the university’s formal policy of exclusion on the basis of sexual orientation. Later that month, the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society refused to approve that same program because of concerns regarding the institution’s discriminatory admissions policy. Law societies in some other provinces have yet to make a decision on accreditation. The purpose of this article is to offer a reply to the arguments advanced by proponents of granting law society accreditation to TWU’s proposed program. The paper rejects six of the central claims that proponents of approval have advanced. First it responds to the claim that TWU does not actually discriminate against the LGBTQ community. Second it speaks to the assertion that the Community Covenant represents a voluntary choice not to engage in same sex sexual intimacy. Third it rejects the contention that TWU welcomes gay and lesbian students. Fourth it challenges the distinction TWU supporters draw between a code of conduct that prohibits same sex intimacy and a policy that excludes gays and lesbians. Fifth it rejects the proposition, broadly accepted by the Benchers of the Law Society of BC, that the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in BCCT is dispositive of the issue faced by law societies today. Sixth, it rejects the claim that opposition to public accreditation of TWU can be equated with opposition to a Christian worldview or the desirability of a faith-based university. The final section of the paper argues that the decisions of the LSUC and the NSBS were reasonable and will be respected by reviewing courts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.078 | 0.197 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.125 | 0.142 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".