Just as soon as she agrees I'm allowed to argue Zeus doesn't agree with commonly accepted standards I'll go with it. Until then she's a jerk using her religion to justify prejudice.

How anyone in her profession can exclude homosexuals baffles me. It's really not that different from excluding Christians from treatment if you are atheist or Muslim. Let's see how well that would go over.

She should have been expelled and it stinks that she got any money.

I do agree that the expulsion was justified. A patient should be helped regardless of their sexual orientation, and for that matter their race, color, national origin, and gender.

As a former counseling student and current therapist, there is another way of looking at this. Do you want a counselor who would prefer not to treat a person like you, but has been forced to do so? I sure don't. I am a female. If a therapist doesn't particularly like females or prefers not to treat them, I hope and pray he will not do so, and I hope even more that he won't be forced to do so. Should I be forced to treat a person whose whole life is religion? I am an atheist. He shouldn't want me as a counselor and I cannot do my best for him. Not because I have anything against him, some of my best freinds are religious, but because I cannot deep down understand him.

Look, counseling is very personal. Even for non-bigots, there are people we are better at treating than other people. No one should have to go to a therapist who is being mandated to treat him or her, and no therapist should be put in a position of having to treat someone they cannot feel empathy for.

When you are in a practice, you certainly have some latitude about the clients you wish to help. I would certainly think people gravitate to helping the people they are best at helping.

But, she was a student. When you are a student, you have no choice since you are being taught to treat and understand everyone. You are also being taught proper treatment protocols. You do not get to say "I won't treat men because all men are animals" because:

1) It is not true.

2) You may have to treat men one day.

The school bailed on this and they have now encouraged this kind of law suit in the future.

you wouldn't mind being treated by a therapist who thinks all men are animals but is not allowed to avoid treating men?

I am making the distinction between school and practice.

Should a surgeon be allowed to skip training on female cadavers because he believes it is immoral to see women nude?

This woman could join a "Christian" practice that wouldn't take gays as patients, but she cannot refuse to treat gays while she is learning the discipline.

If I am training as a doctor and hate men, I can always practice gynecology/obstetrics AFTER I leave med school. But while I am in med school learning to be a doctor I am required to treat men and women. You cannot omit parts of the curriculum you disagree with. If you are going to get a degree in biology, you cannot refuse to take classes in evolutionary biology because you don't believe in evolution.

If you want the degree, you adhere to the curriculum.

She's going to be a really awful counselor if she gets certified. My hunch is you learn about people as individuals - gay and straight - during the period of time you counsel students as part of the program.

Otherwise, what good is the training? You never know who us going to walk through the door.

isn't there psychological testing? Should a fucking self-proclaimed BIGOT be allowed to counsel anyone?

would think you are in the wrong profession. I think most if not every profession have ethical codes of conduct.

It is unethical to treat someone with whom you cannot remain nonjudgmental. There are very few people who can be nonjudgmental about every single person who could possibily walk through the door.

I see no purpose to forcing people (therapists) to be treat people they are not comfortable treating. It's about the patient, not political correctness. No one benefits from a disapproving therapist.

It's immoral for her to do otherwise when accepted psychology does not recognize homosexuality as something to be reversed or "cured."

I personally think she's a quack. Who knows what else she disagrees with in the DSM-IV that she foists on unsuspecting clients.

Deception is unethical in medicine.

see how the school can escape being sued themselves, by agreeing with this decision? Don't they receive Federal Funds, and by this student acting as an employee, discriminated against another student? So why should she be rewarded for this? She could use religious beliefs to discriminate for just about anything.

"The resolution of the lawsuit leaves the university’s policies, programs, and curricular requirements intact," Kraft said. "The faculty retains its right to establish, in its learned judgment, the curriculum and program requirements for the counseling program at Eastern Michigan University."

As a lawyer, it depresses the hell out of me to see how many cases that really need to become precedent because the parties can't afford to bring the action before the courts. The cases that go the distance are ones brought by the rich and powerful and then we wonder why our laws so heavily slanted towards the rich and powerful. We really need more Robin Hood lawyers out there.

The only precedent I'm seeing here is that one can be expelled from school for unpopular thought. Sounds dangerous to me, but then, I'm a wacky ACLU liberal.

There are an awful lot of important issues that never receive judicial review - and thus never contribute to the body of jurisprudence - because the cost of bringing legal action is prohibitively high.

In the instant case, I would have liked to have seen the issues fleshed out more. I'm not sure, but I don't think I share your belief that this is necessarily a freedom of speech issue, although I do admit that I think that we Americans in general, and the ACLU in particular, can sometimes go a bit overboard on the sanctity of free speech. Hate speech, for example, or incitement to violence, are forms of speech that I do not believe should be protected. But setting that aside for the moment, I think there's a really interesting question here of the extent to which academic institutions and professional associations need to be deferential to persons who refuse to practice their professions on religious/moral grounds. The analogy that springs to my mind is Catholic pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control pills. Certainly, I understand that Catholics may have religious convictions that cause them to perceive contraception as sinful, and that's great, more power to them, they should not be required to use contraception. But the necessary function of a pharmacist is to dispense those medications that a physician and his/her patient determine are appropriate for the patient's health and well being. If your religious beliefs prevent you from fulfilling that function, terrific, no one's forcing you to practice that profession. But is it appropriate to voluntarily enter into a profession and then refuse to perform its duties because of your religious beliefs? To me, this seems analogous to the incident described in the article. The student is not merely expressing a personal opinion about homosexuality, which certainly would be an expression of free speech. Rather, she's refusing to fulfill the requirements of a degree and a profession, but still demanding that the university award her the degree despite her refusal to fulfill its requirements. That seems very different to me than merely expressing a personal opinion.

feel it is appropriate to enter a profession and refuse to perform its duties, but I am not suggesting codifying my belief into law. One of my issues here is with the academy end of things. If someone were to refuse to hire her I do not have a problem. I'm not comfortable with the school telling her how she can think. After all, it is from the academy that we get a lot of novel and originally very controversial ideas that later turn into, well, foundations for whole systems of political and philosopical thought. (No, I am not saying that is the case here, but it's the slippery slope).

I also think the doctor prescribing contraception is different from the therapist in that the doctor or pharmacist handing out birth control pills is not changing the efficacy of the product with his disapproval. A therapist disapproving of a gay person should not be treating that person, because her disapproval will taint the product. Forcing her to do so hurts the client and doesn't further the cause of nondiscrimination.

The extreme of this issue is refusing to treat sex offenders, probably the only group that it is acceptable to refuse to deal with in counseling circles. Inwardly I have very little respect for this refusal, but I also believe that if you don't want to treat sex offenders on some moral grounds you should not be treating sex offenders, because you won't be any good at it.

I agree that too many things don't get before a judge due to the cost. I work in mental health with the seriously mentally ill. I day does not go by when I don't say to myself, "If these people could only afford a lawyer..." Of course, in mental health, the law is a VERY blunt instrument always, and all too often a boomerang.

The distinction you draw between counselors being compelled to provide therapy services for which they lack the ability to provide zealously and the pharmacist being required to dispense pills, the quality of which it is not in their ability to modify, is an excellent point. The similarity I still see between the two is that it doesn't serve the public interest to have people involved in professions which they are - for whatever reason - unable to perform. In many sparsely inhabited parts of the country, there may not be a variety of pharmacists from which to choose. If the pharmacist within your reach happens to be one who is unwilling to discharge his/her duties, you, as the patient, may not be able to obtain the medications you require in a timely enough fashion to be of help. What if, bolstered by the example of a colleague pharmacist refusing to dispense contraception without being subjected to professional repercussions, another pharmacist decides to follow that example? And then another? How long before the patient living in some staunchly red state has to scour the state and drive hundreds of miles to obtain the medication they require?

In the same way, it seems like you're opening a similar Pandora's box if you allow therapists to obtain licensure and practice when their personal religious beliefs interfere with their ability to practice their professions. Do we really want to legitimize a professional culture in which practitioners are at liberty to pick and choose which aspects of their profession they deem un/savory? Do we want to subject patients/consumers to the necessity of having to search far and wide to find a practitioner willing to perform his/her duties? Surely, there must come a point somewhere at which we have to say: "Look, this is the job. You want to be a garbage collector, you're going to have to pick up garbage. If your personal morality prevents you from picking up garbage, then don't be a garbage collector."

I do think that the academy could have handled the situation better: rather than expelling her for her distasteful views, they could have (and would have been on stronger ground if they had) simply said, "fine, you want to be a bigot, great, but don't expect us to endorse your application for admission into a profession in which personal bigotry has no place. Go be an electrical engineer or whatever, where your personal beliefs won't adversely affect your professional conduct."

The publicity alone will make it difficult for her to find work outside of a religious organization, and there's not many of those who provide those kinds of services.

counseling programs that earn one a Masters in Divinity. Pastoral counseling, there's tons of it. OK, not TONS, but plenty.

Donations to churches is way down in this country and churches are cutting programs and closing churches in response.

My city has seen four churches close in the last two years because of a lack of funding. I live next door to a church that is in foreclosure and will be closing as soon as they move out their stuff. We're worried because a drug and alcohol rehab organization wants to move in and with an elementary school less than a block away, we don't want to see here.

It does not appear that she was reinstated but did she xfer to another program?

4:18 PM, December 10, 2012

... “EMU has made the decision that is in the best interest of its students and the taxpayers of the state of Michigan to resolve the litigation rather than continue to spend money on a costly trial,” said Walter Kraft, EMU’s vice president for communications, in a written statement.

“The matter has been resolved in the amount of $75,000. The university’s insurance company, M.U.S.I.C. (Michigan Universities Self-Insurance Corporation), will pay the cost of the settlement.”

The lawsuit was filed in April 2009 by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of Julea Ward, a student in the university’s Graduate School Counseling Program, where she was training to become a K-12 school counselor. Ward said the university dismissed her from the program because of her religious beliefs after she declined to counsel a gay client, instead referring the client to another counselor. The university said she was dismissed for not following the American Counseling Association's code of ethics ...

“The resolution of the lawsuit leaves the university’s policies, programs, and curricular requirements intact,” Kraft said. “The faculty retains its right to establish, in its learned judgment, the curriculum and program requirements for the counseling program at Eastern Michigan University” ...

http://www.freep.com/article/20121210/NEWS06/121210071/julea-ward-gay-students-eastern-michigan-emu?odyssey=nav|head

The rules of Ethics in question:

http://www.counseling.org/ethics/feedback/aca2005code.pdf

Rule 1.11,b states as follows:

A.11.b. Inability to Assist Clients If counselors determine an inability to be of professional assistance to clients, they avoid entering or continuing counseling relationships. Counselors are knowledgeable about culturally and clinically appropriate
referral resources and suggest these alternatives. If clients decline the suggested referrals, counselors should discontinue the relationship.

From the Article, the woman in question tried to be true to A.11.b but her supervisors told her she had to provide counseling anyway. There is NOTHING in the article that said the Woman did any HARM to the gay person who was referred to her, she just told her supervisor she was NOT able to help the gay person. In effect she told supervisor that in regards to that person, if she provided counseling and her own prejudices creep in, it may cause more harm then good. Thus under Rule A.11.b she bailed out and asked that the gay person be seen by someone else AND HER SUPERVISOR TOLD HER, SHE HAD TO DEAL WITH THE GAY PERSON, EVEN IF IN THE OPINION OF THE WOMAN SHE MAY CAUSE THE GAY PERSON MORE HARM THEN GOOD.

I hate to say this, that is a Professional at work, she recognized her restrictions and tired to make sure her prejudices did not harm others. Put yourself in her place, you have been told to help someone with counseling, and that person stands for everything you hate. Should you provide counseling, or should you bail? Remember your duty is to HELP the person NOT to confront him.

Every profession has this rule, you do NOT only have the right of refusal, it is a DUTY to do so, if by providing services you believe it will cause more harm then good to the client. Now, A.11 goes on that the counselors can NOT just leave a client, they should refer the client to someone else AND THAT WHAT THIS WOMAN TRIED TO DO. Thus the people who violated the Rules of Ethics were her Supervisors who told her to do what she saw as a problem for her to do. I suspect this was the attack her lawsuit was concentrating on, not the gay angle but that her supervisors were ORDERING her to do what she believe would cause the client harm.

Hard to imagine this kind of thing is still happening in this day and age...