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The reversal by Advanced Education Minister Amrik Virk was made public on Thursday in a statement issued by the university.

“It is difficult to conceive of a justifiable basis for the minister to have revoked his approval of the school of law program,” said TWU president Bob Kuhn.

“As a private Christian university, Trinity Western has demonstrated its place in Canada’s academic community, delivering some of Canada’s highest ranked professional programs.

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After all this back and forth, TWU must be feeling somewhat pleased this month since a motion to rescind its accreditation in New Brunswick failed. So at least that’s settled. But little else about the TWU situation is, which is interesting given that no one actually objects to the rigour of TWU’s legal program. The issue is the covenant.

As a private Christian school, TWU has all its students sign an agreement (a “Community Covenant”) that calls for voluntarily abstaining from sex outside of heterosexual marriage.

Interestingly, though this undertaking is certainly controversial, its legality should be settled as well; the Supreme Court considered a version of it 13 years ago, as it related to TWU’s teachers’ program, and ruled that the B.C. College of Teachers couldn’t deny accreditation because doing so would violate TWU students’ freedom of religious thought.

“The tolerance of divergent beliefs is a hallmark of a democratic society,” the high court said then. And it emphasized that though the covenant itself might discourage homosexual students from applying to TWU, they could still become teachers by applying to any number of other schools in the country. And there was nothing in the covenant that would cause TWU graduates themselves to act in a discriminatory way towards others once they were out there teaching, nor was there any evidence that they would do so. Therefore, the distastefulness of the religious beliefs behind the covenant was not a good enough to reason to bar those who had signed it from entering a profession.