Bowing to demands from faculty and students, Dr. Richard Simpson, Dean of Columbia College, announced that Columbia's sports teams would no longer be nicknamed the Lions.

Today's students' equating of hurt feelings with scarring wounds is a departure that leads to dangerous overreaction. When unwelcome ideas are decried in the language of pain and injury, the impulse to suppress them -- rather than to challenge and debate them -- can be irresistible.

When LGBTQ literature is taught, read and analyzed in the community college English classroom, the clear message is that it is important enough to study and to include in the curriculum; therefore, LGBTQ people must be important enough to be considered as human beings and citizens.

My thesis is that homophobia -- or heterosexism -- exits in the African-American community because of its strict adherence to religious traditions and norms. Consequently, such homophobia appears in the community's literature, arts and culture.

Kim Davis certainly does not walk in the footsteps of progressive leaders who took a stand to improve circumstances for oppressed people. Rather, she follows the muddled path of such people as Alabama Governor George Wallace.

More germane, if you are a negro and part of the LGBT community, step aside; we need to register you as a person fighting for the black cause or the gay cause, pick one -- you can't do both. These are mutually exclusive.