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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Court Upholds Firing of College Official Over Op-Ed Against Gay Rights

By Peter Schmidt
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published December 17, 2012


A federal appeals court has upheld the University of Toledo's decision to fire a high-level human-resources administrator who wrote a newspaper opinion column challenging the idea that gay people deserve the same civil-rights protections as members of racial minority groups.

In a ruling handed down on Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the administrator's column "contradicted the very policies she was charged with creating, promoting, and enforcing," and cannot be excused as merely a statement of her own views as a private citizen. The panel affirmed a lower court's decision to dismiss the administrator's lawsuit accusing the public university of violating her constitutional rights by firing her.

At the center of the case was an opinion essay that Crystal Dixon, who had been the university's interim associate vice president for human resources, published in the Toledo Free Press in April 2008. In it, she wrote that she takes "great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are 'civil-rights victims.'" She argued that she "cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a black woman" because she is biologically and genetically such "as my creator intended." But, she said, "daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle" with the help of groups such as Exodus International, which claim to be able to help people overcome homosexual desires.

The entire article is here.