So there's a news story that's been sitting on the back-back-burner for the past six months or so, illustrating how love wins. The tl;dr version is that a doctor left a public health job in California, amid some uproar, and was fired/not hired (it's reported both ways) for a similar position in Georgia. As far as I have found, it all has to do with the fact that he is also a preacher, and preaches, ya know, Christian-type stuff. I don't think anyone's claiming that his traditional views have actually caused a problem for anyone seeking medical help - but they theorize that it might.
I heard Barry Lynn, of the Orwellianly-named Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, defending this. It's not surprising he actually supports a religious litmus test for a government job. His defense was that the guy won't try to help homosexuals with AIDS, because he believes they choose to be homosexual. This is most interesting, as I've not heard of any medical professionals being kicked out of the hospital for believing that people make choices about, say, their diet, that have consequences. Nor have I heard anyone claiming that having unsafe sex is not a choice. Not until Barry Lynn.
Dr. Eric Walsh, a California physician and former director of public health for the city of Pasadena, Calif. Walsh is also a devout Christian, a Seventh-day Adventist who sometimes preaches in his spare time.
Walsh, a former member of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, had accepted a job in Georgia as a district health director when Georgia officials became aware that he’d delivered a number of “controversial” sermons on his own time — sermons where he articulated orthodox Seventh-day Adventist positions on, among other things, human sexuality, Islam, evolution, and the corrupting influence of pop culture.
In California, Walsh had been attacked by student activists who objected to his selection as a commencement speaker at Pasadena City College. To these activists, working for former president Bush and President Obama to combat AIDS, serving as a board member of the Latino Health Collaborative, and starting California’s first city-run dental clinic for low-income families dealing with HIV/AIDS wasn’t sufficient to overcome the horror at Walsh’s Christian views. Under fire, Walsh canceled his commencement speech — while the city, incredibly, put him on administrative leave. The college replaced him with a gay screenwriter.
When Georgia officials learned of Walsh’s California controversy, they responded by immediately violating the law. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits government employers from considering an applicant’s religion in employment decisions, but Georgia officials not only evaluated Walsh’s religious views, the director of human resources wrote an e-mail to department employees giving them the “assignment” of listening to his sermons.
And so they did. E-mails indicate that health-department employees split the sermons up, listened to Walsh’s religious views, and took notes. Walsh asserts that one department official called and told him that “you can’t preach that and work in the field of public health.” The very next day, Walsh claims that department officials held a “hastily arranged” meeting to discuss Walsh’s employment.
Not everyone supported the witch hunt: Walsh claims that the health department’s own lawyer twice warned department officials that Walsh’s religious beliefs “could play no role” in the department’s employment decisions. One health-department employee issued his own stark warning, saying: “If we do not hire this applicant on the basis of evidence of job performance and disqualify him on the basis of discrimination by those who seek to advance their own agenda and do him harm, I believe we are no better than they are.”
These warnings went unheeded, and two days after health-department officials carried out their “assignment” to watch his sermons, they terminated Walsh — informing him through a mocking voice-mail message that a termination letter was on its way.
The health department has since claimed that the sermons that officials were “assigned” to watch had nothing at all to do with Walsh’s termination. Instead, they claim they fired him because they believed Walsh failed to disclose outside income while working in California — an assertion that Walsh contests and asserts never came up at any stage of the Georgia interview process.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434297/eric-walsh-georgia-public-health-doctor-fired-christian-beliefsThey apparently don't deny that they had people comb through his sermons. In fact, they're doubling down now, by demanding that he turn over any sermon notes, and his Bible (for any marginal notes).
The state of Georgia later filed a Request for Production of Documents and asked for copies of his sermons and all material relating dating back to when he began preaching at the age of 18.
http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2016/october/family-research-council-backs-georgia-pastor-who-refuses-to-hand-over-sermonsPlus, this handy compendium of ways in which we've become more tolerant since we got on "the right side of history."
http://thefederalist.com/2015/07/24/the-big-gay-marriage-lie/
