Does religious freedom really just give license to discriminate? A University of Georgia (UGA) training program claims it does.
The College Fix obtained the UGA Pride Center “Dawg Ally” training, which instructs that “religious exemption laws” are a “license to discriminate” against “LGBTQ people.” Some questions arose: Which religious liberty laws are in question? Are “Dawg Ally” participants allowed to disagree with this premise?
When the outlet tried to dig deeper, UGA spokesman James Hataway stated only that the university “offers a variety of voluntary and optional resources, including this program last offered in Fall 2025 through the Division of Student Affairs, designed to promote respectful engagement across our campus community.”
While it’s true the last known training took place in October 2025, the center continues to advertise it as a “three-hour training for all faculty, staff, and students who are interested in learning about gender and sexual identity, homophobia, [and] heterosexism,” according to The Fix.
The state’s flagship university relies on taxpayer dollars, which in turn at least partly support such trainings.
Arielle Del Turco, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty, noted the irony of taxpayer-funded institutions taking aim at the Constitution.
Del Turco told Decision: “It’s sad that the University of Georgia is effectively defaming the First Amendment. Religious liberty is not a license to discriminate against anyone. Rather, it protects everyone’s fundamental right to live according to their own deeply held beliefs.”
Beyond the religious liberty issues, the training also pushes several ideological ideas. It teaches and urges participants to:
- Stay open to polyamory and use new language so people in polygamous relationships are treated as LGBT allies.
- Join a “Coming Out Activity”: write names of loved ones, roles, and favorite activities on separate slips of paper. In the training, a facilitator then randomly takes some or all of the paper slips away to show how “homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic” attitudes supposedly devastate people who come out.
- Accept a gender-pronoun chart that includes “ze / zir / zirself,” “per / per / perself,” and “hu / hum / humself.”
- Replace everyday language like “Ladies and Gentlemen” with “Distinguished Guest[s]” and “Dear Sir / Madam” with “To whom it may concern.”
Notably, the training heavily relies on resources from the Trevor Project—a far-left activist organization dedicated to promoting LGBT-related ideology. Nathanael Blake, a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, warned, “The Trevor Project is an activist organization whose surveys are so badly conducted that they don’t even rise to the level of junk science—they’re just junk. No one should rely on them for accurate data.”
Blake also noted how he “thought we were past pushing bizarre new pronouns on people, but I guess the University of Georgia didn’t get the memo that Woke … was crazy.”
Echoing this, Blake noted that no government or academic entity should “be demonizing religious liberty,” adding that “it is grotesque that the University of Georgia is abusing the language of civil rights in its attack on the fundamental right of religious freedom.”
Education is designed to “serve the public and promote the common good,” Blake emphasized. “Radical trainings in queer theory and activism do the opposite.”
Del Turco agreed, concluding that “public universities should be revering, not undermining, our freedoms.”
Relevant Bible passages to ponder: Isaiah 5:20, 2 Timothy 4:3
