You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Religion’ category.
July 2010 Update: A federal judge has ruled in EMU’s favor, upholding Julea Ward’s expulsion.
I posted a few weeks ago about Julea Ward, who was expelled from Eastern Michigan University’s counseling graduate program because she insisted that as a Christian she had a moral obligation to steer gay counseling clients to “cultivate sexual desires for persons of the opposite sex.”
When Ward discussed this issue with her professors, they made it clear to her that if she offered such a suggestion in a therapeutic relationship, she would violate the code of ethics of the American Counseling Association. And so, when Ward was assigned to a gay client in the course of her counseling training, she suggested that this client be given a referral to another counselor. (It was that request that set disciplinary proceedings in motion.)
Many of Ward’s defenders have, as she did, suggested that referral would have been an appropriate compromise between Ward’s beliefs and the ACA ethical rules. As someone said in a Reddit discussion of the case yesterday,
One could argue that if she is unable/unwilling to acknowledge homosexuality as an acceptable behavior, then she is ethically obligated to refer the patient to another counselor in order to keep from allowing her personal values from intruding her professional work.
In other words, while it would certainly be wrong for her to make judgements to her patient about their sexuality in a counselling session, perhaps it’s a valid compromise to find her patient a more qualified counselor.
I’ve come across this argument a lot recently, often in online discussions in which Ward’s critics cite my previous article on the subject, and so I’d like to respond to it directly.
Xavier University, the nation’s only historically black Catholic college, has invited Donna Brazile to speak at their commencement, but the Archbishop of New Orleans says he won’t be there.
Brazile, the campaign manager of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign — and a one-time student activist with the United States Student Association — is a black Catholic, and a native of the New Orleans area. But she’s also pro-choice, and that’s not sitting well with Archbishop Alfred Hughes.
Last week a campus political party at the University of Maryland College Park defied their administration and some state legislators and screened about half an hour’s worth of a hardcore porn movie as part of a free-speech forum.
So what’s happened since?
Well, legislators backed off of their threat to immediately axe UMD’s state funding over the screening, but they’re planning to revisit the issue in the fall. The state legislature directed the university to establish a policy on porn on campus before September 1, and at their Friday meeting the university’s regents told the UMD chancellor to present them with a set of recommendations for such a policy by summer.
In other news, the UMD College Park president, uninterested in picking any new fights with right-wing politicians, has overriden a vote of the university senate to drop the opening prayer from the university’s commencement ceremonies. The senate had voted 32-14 to abandon the prayer, with all of the senate’s student members voting with the majority.
The UMD College Park Student Power Party, the campus activists who staged the porn-screening-slash-free-speech-forum, have apparently seen all their candidates go down to defeat in the student government’s executive board elections. Election results aren’t official yet, though, as one of the other slates has charges of campaign violations pending.
Finally, the university’s student government voted unanimously on Thursday to oppose UMD’s contract with apparel-maker Russell Athletic. More than two dozen colleges and universities have dumped RA since the beginning of the year, in response to findings of labor violations at one of RA’s Honduras factories.
July 2010 Update: A federal judge has ruled in EMU’s favor, upholding Julea Ward’s expulsion.
The story of Julea Ward, a former counseling student who is suing Eastern Michigan University over her expulsion from their graduate program, is burning up the right-wing blogosphere.
Conservative commenters on the case generally argue that Ward, a Christian, was removed from the program because she refused to “advocate for homosexual behavior” — or, as National Review‘s David French puts it, “vocally support same-sex sexual conduct.”
But Ward’s attorneys have posted various documents relating to her dismissal up online, and those documents tell a different story.
A former student has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University claiming that she was dismissed from a graduate program in counseling for refusing to “affirm or validate homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship.”
At the start of this year, when she was nearing the end of her coursework at EMU, Julea Ward was engaged in a Counseling Practicum. Ward has religious objections to homosexuality, and when she discovered that one of her assigned clients was gay, she asked her professor whether she should see the client or have him reassigned. That question, she contends, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to disciplinary proceedings and her removal from the program.
The university has declined to comment publicly on the case, but in a March 12 letter the chair of her disciplinary committee said that Ward had “by clear and convincing evidence” violated ethical standards requiring that counselors “avoid imposing values that are inconsistent with counseling goals” or engage in discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
A copy of Ward’s complaint, with various documents relating to the disciplinary charges, can be found in PDF form here.
Update: We analyze Ward’s suit and the conservative blogosphere’s response.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments