Vice president of student affairs Mark Hine said in an e-mail to club President Brian Diaz that the national Democratic party violates the school’s principles by supporting LGBT rights and abortion and is pro socialist.

Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. told the Associated Press that the club’s recognition by the school was “an oversight by an administrator” who didn’t thoroughly consult school policy.

Liberty University has a longstanding anti-gay policy. Openly gay students are denied admission, and students who are found to be gay are expelled.

In 2006, 20 members of the Soulforce Equality Ride were arrested when they entered the campus to discuss LGBT civil rights with students.

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001, Falwell declared that gays and pro-choice advocates were to blame.

Speaking on the 700 Club religious program, Falwell said, “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

He later apologized.

In 2003, Falwell announced that he was putting aside everything to devote his time to passage of a federal constitutional ban on gay marriage.

“I am dedicating my talents, time and energies over the next few years to the passage of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which will protect the traditional family from its enemies who wish to legalize same-sex marriage and other diverse “family” forms,” Falwell said.

In the 2004 election campaign, he worked with Republicans to use same-sex marriage as a wedge issue.  A week after the election he announced he was organizing battle plans for what he called an “evangelical revolution.” Falwell said that the election showed that Americans want to return to “traditional values.”

He promised to roll back gay rights laws in communities across the country.

The university is associated with the conservative Liberty Counsel founded by Mathew D. Staver, Dean of Liberty University School of Law.

Liberty Counsel fights LGBT initiates in courts across the country.

Carrie Prejean, responding to a question about same-sex marriage during the Miss USA pageant, said gay couples should not be allowed to marry and that homosexuality was a matter of choice.

The remarks caused outrage by LGBT rights supporters, but endeared her to Christian conservatives.

Thursday, the National Organization for Marriage announced it hired Prejean to star in a $1.5 million ad campaign to combat same-sex marriage.

The organization already is running ads on cable channels in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Gay rights groups say are “spewing lies” about same-sex marriage. 

In a statement announcing the Prejean ads, NOM said the commercial will call “gay marriage advocates to account for their unwillingness to debate the real issue: gay marriage has consequences.”

The group also claimed Prejean is a victim of gay activists.

“She is attacked viciously for having the courage to speak up for her truth and her values,” the statement said. “But Carrie’s courage inspired a whole nation and a whole generation of young people because she chose to risk the Miss USA crown rather than be silent about her deepest moral values.”

On Wednesday, Prejean was offered a full scholarship at Liberty University, the Lynchburg, Virginia school founded by evangelist Jerry Falwell.

School Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. made the offer Wednesday while Prejean was visiting the conservative Christian school that does not admit openly gay students and expels students who come out.

She currently is a junior at San Diego Christian College, and has not said if she would transfer to Liberty for her senior year.

Earlier this week, the  Miss California pageant expressed concern over her behavior.

“We are deeply saddened Carrie Prejean has forgotten her platform of the Special Olympics, her commitment to all Californians, and solidified her legacy as one that goes beyond the rights to voice her beliefs and instead reveals her opportunistic agenda,” the group said in a statement.

Roose had transferred to the Virginia campus from Brown University in Providence, a famously liberal member of the Ivy League. His Liberty classmates knew about the switch, but he kept something more important hidden: He planned to write a book about his experience at the school founded by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell.

Each conversation about salvation or hand-wringing debate about premarital sex was unwitting fodder for Roose’s recently published book: “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.”

“As a responsible American citizen, I couldn’t just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there,” said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. “If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to.”

Formed in 1971, Liberty now enrolls more than 11,000 residential students, along with thousands more who study through Liberty’s distance-learning programs. The university teaches creationism and that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, while pledging “a strong commitment to political conservatism” on campus and a “total rejection of socialism.”

Roose’s parents, liberal Quakers who once worked for Ralph Nader, were nervous about their son being exposed to Falwell’s views. Still, Roose transferred to Liberty for the spring 2007 semester.

He was determined to not mock the school, thinking it would be too easy – and unfair. He aimed to immerse himself in the culture, examine what conservative Christians believe and see if he could find some common ground. He had less weighty questions too: How did they spend Friday nights? Did they use Facebook? Did they go on dates? Did they watch “Gossip Girl?”

It wasn’t an easy transition. Premarital sex is an obvious no-no at Liberty. So are smoking and drinking. Cursing is also banned, so he prepared by reading the Christian self-help book, “30 Days to Taming Your Tongue.”

He lined up a publisher – Grand Central Publishing – and arrived at the Lynchburg campus prepared for “hostile ideologues who spent all their time plotting abortion clinic protests and sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls.”

Instead, he found that “not only are they not that, but they’re rigorously normal.”

He met students who use Bible class to score dates, apply to top law schools and fret about their futures, and who enjoy gossip, hip-hop and R-rated movies – albeit in a locked dorm room.

A roommate he depicts as aggressively anti-gay – all names are changed in the book – is an outcast on the hall, not a role model.

Yet, some students also grilled him about his relationship with Jesus and condemned non-believers to hell.

After a gunman at Virginia Tech killed 32 people in April 2007, a Liberty student said the deaths paled next to the millions of abortions worldwide – a comment Roose says infuriated him.

Roose researched the school by joining as many activites as possible. He accompanied classmates on a spring break missionary trip to Daytona Beach. He visited a campus support group for chronic masturbators, where students were taught to curb impure thoughts. And he joined the choir at Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church.

Roose scored an interview with the preacher for the school newspaper, right before Falwell died in May of that year. Roose decided against confronting him over his views on liberals, gays and other hot-button topics, and instead learned about the man himself, discovering among other things that the pastor loved diet peach Snapple and the TV show “24.”

Roose would duck away to the bathroom to scribble down anecdotes or record them during lectures. He never blew his cover, even ending a blossoming romantic relationship rather than come clean. He revealed the truth on a return trip to campus. He grappled with guilt during the entire project, but said he ultimately found forgiveness from students for his deception.

“If he told me he was writing an expose or maybe if the book turned out to be what I considered unfair, then I might have been more troubled,” said Brian Colas, a former Liberty student body president who befriended Roose.

The university administration has been less receptive. Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. said in a statement that Roose had a “distorted view” of Liberty before he arrived and gave an incomplete portrait of the school.

“We appreciate Kevin’s generally positive tone toward LU but he admittedly comes from a culture that has very little tolerance for conservative Christianity and even less understanding of it,” Falwell said.

Roose said his Liberty experience transformed him in surprising ways.

When he first returned to Brown, he’d be shocked by the sight of a gay couple holding hands – then be shocked at his own reaction. He remains stridently opposed to Falwell’s worldview, but he also came to understand Falwell’s appeal.

Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly – for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts.

He’s even considering joining a church.

In a brief filed Monday with the Supreme Court the Virginia-based Liberty Counsel says the challenges to Prop 8 have no basis in law.

A day after voters agreed to amend the constitution to ban same-sex marriage, three separate briefs were filed with the high court, arguing the proposition was illegal because it conflicted with existing portions of the constitution.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a writ petition before the California Supreme Court on Wednesday, a preliminary move to a suit. They were the lead groups that successfully argued the original marriage case before the court.

The second notice came from Dennis Herrera, the attorney for the City of San Francisco.  The third was filed by Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred on behalf of a couple married in that city.

The petitions charge that Proposition 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution’s core commitment to equality for everyone. They also say that Prop 8 improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities.

Liberty Counsel is representing the Campaign for California Families, which organized Prop 8.

In its brief, Liberty Counsel said that the challengers are wrong in their basic assumptions and asks the court for the right to argue to allow Prop 8 to stand when the high court hears the case.

“The proponents of same-sex marriage have thrown a ‘Hail Mary’ pass with no receivers down field,” said Mathew D. Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law.

“The law suit seeking to block Proposition 8 is patently frivolous. The people have a right to amend their constitution,” Staver said in a statement.

“It is amazing how much effort has been put in this battle to keep the people from deciding the future of marriage. It makes no sense that four judges can re-write the historic definition of marriage and more than 5 million people cannot restore it to its common understanding as the union of one man and one woman.”

On Sunday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he hoped the Supreme Court would declare Proposition 8 illegal.