Punishing Heresy in the New Sexual Orthodoxy

from Stand Firm by David Fischler 

For all the talk of tolerance and diversity, there is no more intolerant, ruthless, totalitarian mindset than that of the GLBTQIXYZ academic. When it comes to enforcing the new sexual orthodoxy, these people would make the typical Spanish Inquisitor or KGB agent proud.

Case in point: Dr. Margaret Aymer, head of the New Testament department at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, a coalition of historically black seminaries. Seems she had a dissident in her ranks, Dr. Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, and she decided to take care of him before his insidious dissent could take hold. According to World on Campus:

In February, Hopkins invited Dr. Alice Brown-Collins, director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Black Campus Ministries in the New England Region, to speak to a group of conservative students on campus. Despite its diverse theological teachings, the school’s student body comes from the black church, which mostly retains an orthodox interpretation of scripture. After her presentation, Brown-Collins gave one of the students a copy of The Bible and Homosexual Practice by Robert Gagnon.
The next day, Hopkins’ department chair grilled him about the meeting, the book and his association with InterVarsity, an evangelical Christian campus ministry. The whole situation violated ITC’s code of ethics, which pledges the school’s commitment to a diversity that includes sexual orientation, Dr. Margaret Aymer told Hopkins. When he rose to leave, Aymer warned him he had put his job at risk.
Three months later, the school dismissed Hopkins, who has filed a discrimination complaint against ITC with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. ITC discriminated against him for his evangelical beliefs and his sex, Hopkins claims. School administrators also engaged in a deliberate attempt to humiliate him and damage his reputation by changing his students’ grades, in violation of school policy, Hopkins said.

Hopkins has taught at ITC since 2008, and previously had been allowed to set his own classroom course, including being able to choose his own textbooks. Something about the visit by Brown-Collins seems to have alerted Aymer to the fact that there were doubleplusungood ideas being taught on campus, or perhaps she just harbors a special hatred for Inter-Varsity for some unknown reason. In any case, there are a boatload of shenanigans going on:

After Aymer threatened his job, Hopkins filed a formal grievance with the school. Administrators didn’t acknowledge his complaint for two months, during which Aymer continued to write negative reviews of Hopkins. She also tried to make a case against him by calling former colleagues and fellow theologians, Hopkins said. And she told him the orthodox texts he used in his New Testament classes had to go.
“She said none of the books gave the current scholarly view of the New Testament,” Hopkins said. “She said I needed more books conducive to womanist theology, post-colonial theology or LGBT theology.”
At the end of the semester, when one student emailed Hopkins to ask when his grade would be changed, Hopkins learned administrators had started changing his students’ final grades. Ten students, several of whom had gotten F’s from Hopkins, ended up with C’s, or better. One student’s F became an A-.
Changing the grades not only did a disservice to the students and the institution but obviously served to damage the professor’s reputation, an act of retaliation, said Joe C. Hopkins, Jamal Hopkins’ lawyer and father: “Because of one day, one book, one disagreement, or perceived disagreement, his career can be destroyed with the stroke of a pen, without any thought to the significant contribution he can and has made to theological education.”

Aymer preached at the recently concluded Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly, and has been a resource person for the denomination’s Advocacy Committee for Racial and Ethnic Concerns. She’s also, on this evidence (which also appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which added that Hopkins had been given a promotion to associate professor and a raise in February), a disgrace to her profession who would be better suited teaching at a Communist indoctrination school in Havana or Pyongyang. As for the school, if administrators were changing grades, the Association of Theological Schools is going to have to give pulling accreditation some serious consideration.