Well... to be fair, she is in a secular environment and should couch her counseling devoid of her faith.
If she wants to be a counselor for people seeking help from professionals who share the same faith then she should seek a job there.
There is a place for witnessing and there is a place for counseling. Sometimes they meet in the same place but in a secular setting it really would be inappropriate for a counselor to couch her practice, advice or therapy with “her qualifiers”.
Ooops.... and the school has no right to “re-educate” her or force her to accept a new belief.
They can require to abstain from “preaching” but demanding a change in belief and discussing how her re-education is going is way overboard.
First, she is not counseling anyone, she is in training to be a counselor. Even people who want to be Christian counselors need training, right?
Second, there is no evidence she was witnessing. The article appears to show that she answered questions about her beliefs as it pertains to homosexuality, not that she was counseling homosexuals and trying to convert them.
Bottom line, you post makes a lot of assumptions not supported by the story.
Apparently she did - This is a Masters program - until the issue of counseling homosexuals arose and she could not simply pretend she approved of the practice without lying.
If she wants to be a counselor for people seeking help from professionals who share the same faith then she should seek a job there.
She probably planned to do just that but she needs her degrees, first. The school is effectively denying her that unless she pretends to approve of homosexual behavior and 'counsel' homosexuals accordingly, which she cannot do in good conscience.
There is a place for witnessing and there is a place for counseling. Sometimes they meet in the same place but in a secular setting it really would be inappropriate for a counselor to couch her practice, advice or therapy with “her qualifiers”.
She wasn't 'witnessing'. She simply cannot pretend to approve of homosexual behavior and the school refuses to accept her position and insists she be 're-educated'. Granted, it appears to be a stalemate situation but the school is frighteningly heavy-handed in it's strict requirement that she accept homosexual behavior as 'normal', when it clearly is not. I hope she wins the suit.
You raise interesting issues. Is “witnessing” (an activity Christians are enjoined by their religion to do, albeit not in all circumstances) something similar to “proselytizing” (something Moslems vehemently oppose, other than their own)? Does not extolling the virtues of a positive acceptance, if not open glorification, of homosexual lifestyles constitute “proselytizing”? If not, why not?
I’m not familiar with the protocols of professional counseling, but I can’t imagine counseling taking place in a values vacuum. So the question arises, what values? What values are acceptable for counseling? Surely not human sacrifice, or the blood sacrifice of goats or chickens in lieu of humans. Nor, we must think, the advocating of female bondage for the purposes of prostitution. But at Augusta State, by all accounts Christian values must be numbered right along with blood sacrifice and female bondage as unacceptable for Counseling values.
“. . . it really would be inappropriate for a counselor to couch her practice, advice or therapy with “her qualifiers”.”
What does that mean? If the accusation is that Miss Keeton is “proselytizing” (that is, “witnessing” or “preaching”), whence comes the charge? We’ve no indication Miss Keeton has given a signal that her intention is to “convert” homosexuals or other unbelievers. If a patient were to confess pedophilia (someone in serious need of counseling), would it be “inappropriate” for a counselor to couch his practice advice or therapy with certain “qualifiers”? Would not the counselor be roundly condemned for a failure to do exactly that? Yet Miss Keeton’s values apparently are not acceptable, however mildly expressed.