The incident at The University of the Cumberlands is really sickening and now attracting a great deal of national attention -- again painting Kentucky with a broad brush of being a state of backwards, intolerant homophobes.
For those of you not yet up-to-speed:
Last week, the Southern Baptist university dismissed Jason Johnson, 20, a sophomore theater arts major from Lexington, after he disclosed on a Web site that he is gay. That action put the spotlight on the University of the Cumberlands' rule against homosexuality and extramarital sex. A school policy says both are "not consistent with Christian principles."
Sadly, included as part of yesterday's state budget was $11 million for the university -- $10 million for a pharmacy building and $1 million for pharmacy scholarships. Though, because of the schools policies, and this incident, they will run into some serious problems with national accreditation standards that prohibit discrimination against gays.
However, that begs the question why are we using public money to support schools that discriminate like this in the first place, but beyond the public funding issue it also reveals some dirty little secrets that some of the conservative religious schools must contend with when their hyper-morality policies conflict with those in charge -- not a 20-year-old undergraduate student.
For instance, take Asbury College here in Central Kentucky (Wilmore). The following is from the Christian college's staff handbook on acceptable conduct:
The student population of Asbury College looks to employees for spiritual guidance and example. Therefore, certain behaviors are considered to be inappropriate for a staff person.
...Certain behaviors are expressly prohibited in the Scripture and therefore are unacceptable in the Asbury College community. These behaviors include: theft (including plagiarism), lying, dishonesty, gossip, slander, profanity, vulgarity (including crude language), sexual immorality (including adultery, homosexual behavior, premarital sexual intimacy), drunkenness, immodesty of dress, and occult practices. While not explicitly mentioned in Scripture, Asbury believes that the following represent violations of Biblical principles and also are unacceptable: abortion, gambling, and pornography.
Seems as Asbury College hold its staff and officers to very specific and rigorous standards of conduct, right?
Well, here's where Asbury's preaching and practice go its separate ways.
Many of you will recall news-stories last year about a prominent and very controversial OB-GYN who President Bush appointed to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs who led the charge to get the agency to NOT approve over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill.
His name was Dr. David Hager.
Hager is a member of the Asbury College Board of Trustees and even sits on the school's Executive Committee. His father is a past president of the college, and the school's administrative building, Hager Hall, bears the family name.
Well, last year, Hager wife of 32 years, Linda Carruth Davis, went public with a very personal confessional of a life of domestic sexual assault and infidelity that she claimed her husband inflicted upon her, finally leaving him a few years earlier. Davis says she remains a religious and political conservative.
In an incredibly powerful chronicle of their life, Davis recounted the following very disturbing and candid episodes:
Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible."
[...]
In tandem with his medical career, Hager has been an aggressive advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right. A member of Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council and the Christian Medical and Dental Society, Hager assisted the Concerned Women for America in submitting a "Citizen's Petition" to the FDA in August 2002 to halt distribution and marketing of the abortion pill, RU-486.
[...]
Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, she could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. "I would be asleep," she recalls, "and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I would [confront] David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do that,' and I would say, 'No, I never asked for it.'"
[...]
Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis's. A close friend of Davis's remembers her calling long distance when she found out: "She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But she was committed to working it out."
[...]
By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.
[...]
By 1995, according to Davis's account, Hager's treatment of his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. It was a uniquely stressful year for Davis. Her mother, dying of cancer, had moved in with the family and was in need of constant care. At the same time, Davis was suffering from a seemingly inexplicable exhaustion during the day. She began exhibiting a series of strange behaviors, like falling asleep in such curious places as the mall and her closet. Occasionally she would--as she describes it--"zone out" in midsentence in a conversation, and her legs would buckle. Eventually, Davis was diagnosed as having narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects the brain's ability to regulate normal sleep-wake cycles.
For Davis, the diagnosis spelled relief, and a physician placed her on several medications to attain "sleep hygiene," or a consistent sleep pattern. But Davis says it was after the diagnosis that the period of the most severe abuse began. For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims. "My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity," Davis surmises. Sometimes she fought Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to circle back later that same night; at other times, "the most expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of being available to him."
[...]
As for David Hager, after repeated attempts to interview him for this story, we finally spoke for nearly half an hour in early April. That conversation was off the record. "My official comment is that I decline to comment," he said.
Hager expanded on his refusal to comment with the Herald-Leader with this semantic non-denial denial:
"As I said before, the allegations as stated do not reveal all of the information and therefore they're incomplete and not true. No one likes to be criticized, no one likes to be torn apart privately or publicly and I think that it's disappointing that my former wife has chosen this avenue to vent her anger and bitterness."
Hager eventually left the FDA as public outcry over his personal and professional conduct became public, but today Hager continues to sit as a Board of Trustee for one of the most well-respected Christian colleges in Kentucky, as well as serving on its Executive Committee.
Despite violating so many of Asbury's own codes of conduct that govern staff and officers, Hager was never investigated by the school (at least there is no record or acknowledgment of any) and rather than expressing concern about his conduct when the story emerged, Hager's colleagues defended him in the story above.
So, how we square the troubling double-standard of applying its code of conduct by these two religious schools?
One religious school (Cumberland) expelled an honors student simply for admitting to being gay, but had never been reprimanded for any conduct in the past. The other school (Asbury) turned a blind eye to allegations of rape, forcible sodomy, and adultery committed by one of its highest ranking trustees and not denied by Hager himself.
Of course, our corrupt Senate President David Williams (R) waded into the Cumberland debate yesterday by telling the Herald-Leader:
"I have done a little research today and it appeared to me that this young man might very well be a provocateur in this entire thing," Williams said.
I'm sickened by this whole episode. The hypocrisy and double-standards at issue are astounding and we can't let the religious zealots get away with this behavior, nor can we let someone who has lived such a noteworthy un-Christian life like David Williams (per public stories about his personal life) be allowed to spew his hateful and hypocritical statements like this.
How much longer will Kentucky women sit on their hands while people like David Hager are asked by colleges to provide moral leadership for their students?
And quite disturbing is the fact that Hager remains a part-time faculty member for the University of Kentucky.
Maybe it's time for the media to start looking at these inconsistencies as well.
UPDATE: No surprise here:
HAGER, W.
1463 PINE NEEDLES LANE
LEXINGTON, KY, 405130000
Employer : WOMENS CARE CENTER
Occupation : PHYSICIAN INDIVIDUAL Contribution
$1,000.00 on 07/09/2003
FLETCHER, ERNIE for
SLATE - STATEWIDE
HAGER, W DAVID
LEXINGTON,KY 40502
WOMENS CARE CENTER
5/6/1998
$250
Fletcher, Ernest
HAGER, W DAVID
LEXINGTON,KY 40502
WOMENS CARE CENTER
8/14/1998
$250
Fletcher, Ernest
HAGER, W DAVID
LEXINGTON,KY 40502
WOMENS CARE CENTER
9/3/1998
$250
Fletcher, Ernest
HAGER, W DAVID
LEXINGTON,KY 40502
WOMENS CARE CENTER
8/19/1997
$250
Fletcher, Ernest
HAGER, W DAVID
LEXINGTON,KY 40502
WOMENS CARE CENTER
10/31/1997
$250
Fletcher, Ernest
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