The Bay State branch of the ACLU is backing tenured professor Lauren Barthold against her employer, Gordon College, which strongly disciplined Barthold for speaking out against Gordon College President D. Michael Lindsay’s signing of a letter that urged President Obama to allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ people on the basis of religion.
The ACLU filed a civil rights lawsuit on April 28 against the college in defense of Barthold.
According to an ACLU Massachusetts website posting:
Barthold was threatened with termination and later disciplined because she wrote a letter to a newspaper and was quoted in a newspaper article as a critic of the president’s action. Although the administration backed down from the threat to terminate Professor Barthold after receiving a warning letter from one of her attorneys, they subsequently imposed discipline on her–removing her from faculty leadership positions, denying her the scheduled right to apply for a promotion, and removing her from serving as director of the gender studies minor.
Announcing its lawsuit, the organization’s press release stated that:
“This case is important to preserving academic freedom and preventing the violation, in the name of religion, of important rights to be free from discrimination and retaliation in the workplace,” said Joshua Solomon of Pollack Solomon Duffy LLP, cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Although Gordon describes itself as a Christian liberal arts college, Gordon’s faculty members like Lauren Barthold are not ministers, and Gordon is not a seminary or a house of worship. It is a liberal arts college and is subject to Massachusetts laws prohibiting retaliation against its employees, including its faculty, who speak critically about important issues of the day,” he said. …
Although the administration backed down from the threat to terminate Professor Barthold after receiving a warning letter from attorney Solomon, they subsequently imposed discipline on her–removing her from faculty leadership positions, denying her the scheduled right to apply for a promotion, and removing her from serving as director of the gender studies minor.
“The ACLU of Massachusetts cares about both religious freedom and the right to speak out against discrimination,” said Sarah Wunsch, deputy legal director for ACLU of Massachusetts. “But religious freedom does not mean the freedom to do anything to others in the name of religion.” …
The lawsuit, filed in Essex Superior Court, contends that Gordon officials violated various state laws protecting against retaliation for opposing discrimination, sex discrimination, and interference with freedom of expression and association.
For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts, go to the organization’s website.
