Does Notre Dame fear the queers?': Op-ed claims school blocked LGBT rebuttal of chaste gay speaker

Not everyone at the University of Notre Dame was pleased after Dan Mattson — a speaker and writer who's gay and chaste — spoke on the iconic Catholic campus.

After all, he did tell students he found fulfillment by choosing chastity over homosexual behavior, the College Fix reported, which noted Mattson's book, “Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace."

“I am actually somebody, believe it or not, who came into the Catholic Church because of the Church’s teaching on sexuality and homosexuality,” Mattson said during his talk, the outlet said. “The gift that [the Church] gives to me is to constantly remind me of how beloved I am by God. And part of that … is to guide me in the path that will lead to human fulfillment.”

'Does Notre Dame fear the queers?'

Well, that apparently got the collective Irish up within a pair of students who penned an op-ed blasting Mattson — as well as the college for allegedly disallowing an LGBT rebuttal to his talk.

In their column for the Observer, “Does Notre Dame fear the queers?” Michael O’Dea and Mary Szromba wrote that “rhetoric of people like Mattson creates a culture of exclusion and repression."

And while the pair said they support Mattson's right to express "harmful and glaringly unsupported" opinions, they called out the college for not opening similar doors for those "most affected by these opinions."

O’Dea and Szromba said "PrismND, Notre Dame’s LGBTQ student organization, is not permitted to invite speakers with opposing views." They added that the school "has persistently smothered such efforts of student expression. This clearly has a chilling effect on individual student speech to the extent that, we must admit, we were nervous about writing this article. This culture of censorship is unbecoming of a top-tier university."

Dennis Brown, Notre Dame's assistant vice president for news and media relations, told TheBlaze on Tuesday afternoon that the school had no comment about the op-ed's claims.

This story has been updated.