Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund have sued Augusta State University in Georgia on behalf of a counseling student who claims the university told her to deny her Christian beliefs in order to graduate.
Jennifer Keeton, 24, who is pursuing a master's degree in counseling, said she was ordered to undergo a re-education plan that requires her to attend "diversity sensitivity training," complete additional remedial reading and write papers to describe their effects on her beliefs, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The ultimatum: Complete this re-education plan or be expelled from ASU's Counselor Education Program.
ASU said Miss Keeton's conduct violates the code of ethics to which counselors and counselors in training are required to adhere, including those of the American Counseling Association and the American School Counselor Association.
"It's hard to conceive of a more blatant violation of her right to freedom of speech and her freedom of conscience," said David French, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative-leaning group that defends religious freedom. "This type of leftist zero-tolerance policy is in place at far too many universities, and it must stop."
Ms Duke goes on to remind us in her article of a similar case:
Miss Keeton's case is one of several nationwide in which counseling students have been dismissed from programs or threatened with expulsion because of their Christian beliefs.
One case involves counseling student Julea Ward, who was dismissed from Eastern Michigan University's School of Counseling after she refused to change her beliefs. After a client asked Miss Ward for advice on a same-sex relationship, she asked her adviser on how to help her client because, she said, she couldn't morally affirm such relationships. Miss Ward ultimately referred her client to another counselor. The university dismissed Miss Ward from the program in March 2009. The case is now being litigated in federal court.
In Miss Keeton's case, ASU has threatened expulsion because of the Christian ethical convictions she shares in and out of the classroom, given the proper context, on human sexuality and gender identity.
The good progressive folks who run these universities talk endlessly about tolerance, diversity, and the freedom to believe what one chooses, but they don't mean a word of it. They themselves are narrow-minded bigots who wish to impose a strict uniformity and conformity of thought on their students. So far from aspiring to cultivate a student body comprised of individuals who can think for themselves, their real objective is to compel their students to think the way they tell them to think.
As a friend of mine put it, to modern academics diversity is people who look different and all think the same.
RLC
