This is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. A link to the Chronicle was sent to me for a totally different article, but I noticed this and wanted to write about it.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Augusta, Ga., the student, Jennifer Keeton, argues that faculty members and administrators at the university have violated her First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion by threatening her with expulsion if she does not fufill requirements contained in a remediation plan intended to get her to change her beliefs.

I remember the very first time I went and spoke to a councilor about “gay issues.” I was in a relationship with someone who was lying to me, and even though I caught him cheating on me, he denied it. It wasn’t a healthy relationship at all. I remember the councilor (this was 1979) said to me that he had never had a gay client, nor did he know anything about being gay, but that relationships were most likely the same, no matter the gender of the two people, and in any relationship, everyone deserves an honest partner. I’ll never forget his honesty with me- that he didn’t know anything about working with a gay client, but that people are just people. Who knows what his religious views were, because they didn’t matter. They didn’t come into the discussion. He could have been opposed to gay people for all I knew, but he placed my need before his own belief system.

I broke up with that guy, by the way. Told him, I deserved a boyfriend who was honest with me. Never saw that counselor again. Have lived happily ever after. 🙂

That’s all this Educational Institution is expecting, for this would-be professional to place the needs of a client center-stage in a counseling session, and leave her personal feelings out of it. That is not the same as expecting her to change her personal feelings.

There is anther reason why this and similar cases are so important. The anti-gay community has for decades or longer used bad science to support their claims about gay people. They have a goal (it is the anti-gay agenda) to get degrees and diplomas and the trappings of authority in Science so that when they spout off their bad science, it still has an air of legitimacy. And this we have to avoid where ever possible.

via Augusta State U. Is Accused of Requiring a Counseling Student to Accept Homosexuality – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Photo by Mike_fleming under the Creative Commons License.