Appeals Court Rejects Christian Student’s Bid for Reversal of Her Expulsion

Gingrich won’t be happy with these judges. How dare they tell Ms. Keeton that she doesn’t have a legal basis for her feelings of moral superiority.

So what you are saying that someone in a publicly funded university in a publicly funded conselling training program can refuse  to  help  anyone who has more melanin  in her skin than she does on the basis of her  beliefs?  Not to long ago the Christian Right argument was that people of color  were inferior to white people because they figured out the bible told them so.

What the difference between this and refusing to counsel gay people when you are participating in a counselling program at a public university?

There are plenty of  Christian colleges which the student in question could attend as long as those colleges and their students are not subsidized with my own hard earned tax money.

I think Jennifer Keeton is pursuing the wrong profession. I do a lot of counseling myself (in the context of HIV testing), and Ms. Keeton obviously is incapable of observing some of the concepts and skills in the counseling profession. As counselors we are supposed to focus on the feelings and personal circumstances of our clients, not our own personal prejudices and how we think things “ought” to be. We are supposed to manage our own discomfort with clients whose lives and values may be significantly different from our own. We are called to be non-judgmental and empathetic.

Judging from all the things I’ve read about Jennifer Keeton so far, I think she is far better suited to starting her own ministry, or perhaps going to work for one of the many “Family Values” lobbies. But proselytizing is NOT counseling.

You don’t know the first thing about counseling, do you?

The ACA’s code of ethics is based upon, among many other worthy things, research. And the research showing that plaintiff’s beliefs have no factual basis and in fact can do actual harm to counseling clients if propagated under the guise of “counseling” is plentiful.

The district-court judge would not have been remiss in balling up Ms. Keeton’s complaint and throwing it at her lawyer.

Actually, he would have been therein remiss and displayed injudicial temperment.  Perhaps that’s why he is a Federal judge.  The District Court issued a limited ruling, on the basis of a limited record, and denied plaintiff a preliminary infunction. He [the judge] drew a sharp distinction between a person, in this case a counselor in training,’s personal beliefs and their counseling actions and cited testimony from one of the defendant faculty that it would be possible in principle for a student holding the beliefs the plaintiff held to in fact complete satisfactorily the program.

Read the decision of the District Court and the panel for the 11th Circuit.  That is not what either of them “told her”.

jffoster,
You obviously have far more than an ounce of intelligence, for you understood my post while others did not.  I don’t want anyone to treat anyone else badly (even Chronicle blog posters with whom I disagree).

On the merits, how can she be a counselor if she does not learn the scientific, psychological and non-ideological reality of LGBT life?  On the process, the courts are spot on.  

Jesus was crucified and homegirl won’t even look for another line of work? 

This reminds me of an old Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers cartoon.  After a Supreme Court ruling stating that community standards should be taken into account when determining whether something was obscene, the Freak Brothers decided to set their own community’s standards.  “Re-elect Richard Nixon” posters were, of course, deemed obscene…

The point is that the interaction between civil rights and First Amendment freedoms in this case isn’t close. Granting this woman the right to impose her personal beliefs upon her clients would, by implication, also allow atheist teachers to teach their students that all religions are mere superstition. Somehow I doubt that the plaintiff in this case believes that people with beliefs that do not match her own have the same right to freedom of expressioin that she claims for herself.

This is the problem with conservatives these days – so many of them have no fixed moral principles. Instead, it’s all “the ends justify the means.”

What are the plaintiff’s plans for taking this all the way to the Supreme Court? Or is she not as delusional as say, Orly Taitz? Good on the courts for benchslapping this ignoramus. “Christian” my eye…

Look, this was a preliminary injunction denial — that’s all.   No summary judgement on the case itself was rendered by the District Trial Court nor the 11th Circuit. The case itself has not yet come to trial.  I suspect it will not come to trial and will go away, but one of the panel for the 11th Circuit wrote separately concurring in judgement and in part, but suggesting there were some bits of indication in the record that the university might have been trying to precensor plaintiff’s beliefs. And the District Court indicated that “she might well prevail” in trial, though it did not seem likely from the limited record and evidentiary hearing, and that in any case she had not met the burden of proof to warrant a temporary injunction.

This is where I hope I never forget my student perspective as I transition into my role as a professor. This girl smells of privilege through and through. There are MANY courses that I was required to take that offended my identity, moral sensibilities, and intellectual base, but I took them because I realized that sometimes you gotta just put on your big boy pants and suck it up. That being said, I was never penalized for writing or expressing views that were counter to the ideology of the course or professor as long as they were respectfully delivered, supported by research and reason, and well executed. That was my way of taking the high road and it made me a better scholar. 

However, I assert that Ms. Keeton suffers from one or more of the following: she has never has to endure having her values directly challenged, she has been pampered to the point of being unable to tolerate discomfort of any kind and expects the world to bend to her will, and/or she is opportunistically using this situation to publicly protest the increasing acceptance of homosexual identities and promote her own agenda. Had she the intellectual skill, will, and tenacity, she could have simply weathered the course with her morals intact. I suspect that she knew that she would have been a pariah and was unwilling to have her privileged white Christian status challenged. Grad students will tolerate a conservative perspective, but not an inflexible mind.

Having started down the road toward a career as a clinical psychologist, I agree with the court’s interpretation of the situation and its decision. A counselor is not there to promote an agenda; he is there to promote healing. It is well documented that this woman’s agenda is potentially toxic. Ethics dictate that she should perhaps look into becoming clergy if the counseling she wishes to do is going to be wrapped in her dogma.