SPRINGFIELD, Missouri, April 25, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – A Christian student is suing Missouri State University for ejecting him from its Masters in Counselling program in a case with huge implications for the counselling and psychotherapy professions.
Andrew Cash was a student nearing completion of MSU’s Masters of Counselling program in 2011 when he served his internship at the Springfield Marriage and Family Institute (SMFI), a Christian counselling center where he worked with couples while under supervision of the accredited staff.
Cash got into trouble when he persuaded one of his teachers to let the institute give a class presentation on Christian counselling. One of Cash’s classmates asked the director what he would do if asked to counsel a same-sex couple. He responded that he would counsel them as individuals but not as a couple because of his religious convictions about marriage being necessarily heterosexual.
Shortly SMFI was removed from MSU’s list of approved supervising agencies, Cash’s 51 hours of supervised counselling were expunged from his record, and, as part of a re-education program, he was required to audit two courses he had already passed, and submit to 10 hours of personal counselling for “counter transference issues.” This refers to a counsellor unconsciously “transferring” emotions onto patients that he initially felt towards people in his personal life.
But Cash fought to have his hours with SMFI recognized and appealed several times up the administrative ladder at the university. He also continued to defend SMFI’s approach, which he deemed proper for a Christian. He told them that he too would refer same-sex couples to others because “his approach to counselling is centered on his core beliefs, values and Christian worldview and these would not be congruent with the likely values and needs of a gay couple.”
But according to his complaint filed this week in Missouri by his lawyers at the Chicago-based Thomas More Society, his faculty advisor told him that “he could not hold these views, which she deemed to be unethical, and which, she asserted, contradicted the American Counselling Association's code of ethics as discriminatory toward gay persons.”
Cash is suing the university’s board of directors and three faculty members for violating his “freedom of thought, speech, religion and association,” while causing “tormenting, devastating, crushing” emotional distress and financial hardship by wrecking his chance at a counselling career. He is seeking unspecified punitive damages and reinstatement in the program.
MSU spokeswoman Suzanne Shaw said the university had not seen the lawsuit, but added, “The university strictly prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion or any other protected class.”
The issue is much larger, extending not only to other counselling students in U.S., Canadian and British universities, but to practising counsellors whose professional bodies have ethics codes forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, while providing no conscientious objection exemption for Christians.
Neither the American Counselling Association nor the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists have conscience clauses. The AAMFT, moreover, attacked Tennessee’s new religious freedom restoration law, because it explicitly protects counsellors.
The AAMFT stated on its website, “We believe that the legislation, as it is currently written, would likely create opportunities for discrimination to occur. Any legislation that creates such opportunities, whether intentional or unintentional, is not in the best interests of Tennesseans.”
Medical professional bodies routinely provide conscience clauses so that doctors need not perform abortions, though they also often require referrals. The legalization of euthanasia in Canada by a court ruling has meant a debate over whether Christian doctors can be required to perform euthanasia or to refer patients to other doctors who will.