Former Augusta State University student Jennifer Keeton, a trainee school counselor who filed a federal lawsuit claiming that ASU staff had required her to accept homosexuality or be expelled from the Counselor Education masters degree program, lost her legal fight on Friday when U.S. District Judge Randal Hall dismissed the case.

Writing in a 28-page opinion, Judge Hall was skeptical of Keeton’s claim that the university had discriminated against her and violated her free speech rights, saying that the university’s issue was not with her private Christian beliefs but rather “her inability to separate her personal beliefs in the judgment-free zone of a professional counseling situation”.

Keeton Claims her First Amendment Rights Were Infringed
Keeton, together with the self described Christian legal group the Alliance Defense Fund, filed the lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in Augusta back in July.

The lawsuit claimed that Keeton’s First Amendment rights were violated when course leaders in the K-12 school counseling program assigned her remedial work.

She was given this remedial work after staff became concerned due to Keeton repeatedly refrencing in class, out of class and in written essays, her personal belief that gay and lesbian people choose their sexual orientation, that it is an unhealthy lifestyle choice, and that homosexuality is due to some kind of gender confusion and a lack gender binary roles.

These concerns were compounded by her attempts to convert other students to her beliefs and further exacerbated when a fellow student claimed that Keeton had advocated the widely discredited process of conversion therapy which spuriously attempts to cure gay people.

Keeton has always denied the claim that she advocated conversion therapy and was adamant that she could effectively counsel LGBT students, but freely admitted to staff that she would not be able to affirm that an LGBT student’s sexuality or gender expression was healthy.

The faculty duly designed a remediation plan for Keeton which included wider reading on LGBT topics, diversity training workshops and the suggestion that she might want to associate more with LGBT people, for instance by attending the local gay pride event. She was also asked to write reports throughout the course of this remedial work to demonstrate what she had learned from her experiences. At this time Keeton was informed that, as was standard with remedial work, if she failed to complete the plan she would not be able to continue with the course.

After initially agreeing to the remedial work, Keeton eventually reneged, saying that she could not complete the plan because, in her view, staff were tying to force her to accept homosexuality and that this would be against her beliefs. She also told course leaders that her free speech was being stifled because she felt she could no longer freely express her opinions in class without risk of censure.

The faculty denied that this was the purpose of the plan, saying instead that the remedial work was designed to ensure that Keeton, as a counselor-in-training, could fulfill the demands of the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics which mandates a professional neutrality and a strict non-discrimination policy, something that was at the heart of the masters degree program.

Read more about the case in our previous Care2 coverage of this story.

Judge Rejects Keeton’s Lawsuit

U.S. District Judge Randal Hall issued his opinion on Friday, writing that, from the evidence presented, ASU’s faculty had not tried to make Keeton subscribe to a pro-LGBT viewpoint, nor was the case about “pitting Christianity against homosexuality” as the Alliance Defense Fund had attempted to establish.

Instead, Judge Hall wrote that the faculty were within their rights to assign remedial work to assuage their concerns over Keeton’s ability to counsel LGBT school students without imposing her own religious views, and that the faculty’s concerns had been consistent with the nature of the course, as was the remediation plan.

From The Augusta Chronicle:

[Keeton] provided no evidence that ASU faculty imposed the remediation plan because they personally disagreed with her views, Hall said.

In an Aug. 11 hearing, ASU professors testified that the plan was not a punishment for voicing her beliefs, but a tool to teach Keeton how to counsel clients while not imposing her views.

“All three professors testified that they never told (Keeton) that she was required to change her religious beliefs in order to stay in the counseling program,” Hall wrote.

He noted that Keeton did not testify at the hearing nor present any witnesses in support of her motion.

Crucially, Hall tackled Keeton’s assertion that she was being made to change her beliefs, writing in the legal opinion:

The record indicates that the belief the faculty is referring to, rather than the Plaintiff’s personal views on sexual morality, is the belief that Plaintiff’s moral view is preferable to a homosexual counselee’s moral view, and that therefore Plaintiff ought to tell the counselee as much in a counseling setting.

Ultimately, Hall ruled that the remediation plan was “academically legitimate” and that the requirements of the plan had not been markedly different from other remedial plans assigned by the faculty.

Writing that Keeton had “failed to clearly establish her high burden of persuasion of a ‘substantial likelihood’ of success of the merits of her case,” Judge Hall denied the preliminary injunction Keeton had sort and ruled therein that it was permissible for the university to expel Keeton for failing to meet the requirements of the remediation plan.

Keeton is reportedly now taking the course at the Augusta Christian School, presumably with an eye to going into Christian counseling.