When Dr. Brad Lopez, a health instructor at Fresno City College, in California, told students about how homosexuality is a “biological misapplication of human sexuality,” that gay relationships were “one-sided foundation[s] for raising children,” and said the world would end, according to the Bible, with the earth engulfed in flames, and how “that is the real global warming we should be worried about,” he was merely exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech. Or at least the college district’s academic freedom policy. Fresno City College has, appropriately, disagreed.
What started as a petition in 2009, by students Jacqueline Mahaffey and Jay Matthews, and grew into an ACLU intervention in February, has resulted in Fresno City College acknowledging Dr. Lopez violated a whole shit ton of policies, including Administrative Rule 3430, whih bars things like “insulting comments directed at a group based on sexual orientation.” Lopez also ran afoul of the rules, administrators concluded, by “teaching religious material,” according to a letter it sent the students.
So is Dr. Lopez fired? TBD, but probably not.
The letter acknowledges that some of Dr. Lopez’s statements in his classes were, indeed, protected under the State Center Community College District’s academic freedom policy. The letter emphasized that “instructors are entitled to interpret personal findings and to communicate their conclusions, even when at variance with those of other persons.”
However, Villa noted in the letter, “Nothing in the district’s academic freedom policy or any other controlling law or policy permits instructors to engage in indoctrination, the presentation of irrelevant subject matter, or the creation of hostile learning environment for students.” The college will take “appropriate actions to address the violations of policy and regulations,” Villa wrote. Mahaffey said she was eager to find out how the college will discipline Lopez for the damage he has done and continues to inflict on his students.
romeo
There’s a college in Fresno?
Keldawgs
when are these nerf heads gonna wake up.
LOOOL
What an a**hole.
Yanks…
Michael
Gee, you think he’s a closeted homosexual???
David in Houston
“He told students about how homosexuality is a biological misapplication of human sexuality” …said the reincarnation of Colonel Sanders with crazy eyes and mush for brains.
A “one-sided foundation for raising children”? Well, I think he’s a one-sided foundation for inbreeding. It might be best if he shuts his pie hole, and doesn’t speak of things he knows nothing about.
merkin
Forget about anti-discrimination policies–shouldnt this guy be in hot water for wasting classroom time and discussing information irrelevant to health class? Last time I checked, Armageddon wasnt covered in health class.
EWE
Fresno sucks. Always has. I never heard one gay person tell me they liked that backward town.
Greg Theron
I go to Fresno City College. Someone needs to burn down this town already.
Happy Fresnan
“No. 1 · romeo
There’s a college in Fresno?”
What an asshat.
“No. 8 · Greg Theron
I go to Fresno City College. Someone needs to burn down this town already.”
You know what? be the change you want to see in the world. i.e. Do something about the world/city/college you live in/go to. Don’t just whine.
schlukitz
Dr. Brad Lopez, a health instructor at Fresno City College, in California, a is biological misapplication of human intelligence.
Cam
If this guy had spoken out against women, somebody’s race, or some student that had an abortion he would be fired. The college needs to stop allowing people to hide behind phony religeous beliefs to explain their bigotry. Society didn’t allow the Mormons to do that when they were pressued to allow blacks full membership in their church, so if the only reason they are going soft on this guy is because of his religeon they need to rethink it.
Greg Theron
I’m not whining am I? This place really does suck, and I can understand why you like it. I mean, what are you? Like 50? You probably have a decent paying job and live with your husband and your dogs, and you enjoy it, and I’m happy for you. No offense, but Fresno isn’t what it used to be. We have religious bigots in Clovis and some in Fresno, and horrible violence. What could be worse?
Eric
That guy’s beard is a biologically misapplication of human follicality.
Brien McCrea
I dig the story- with a quick glance there was a typo above:
Typo: “Rule 3430, whih bars things like “insulting comments”
cheers.
Yuki
Er… while reading further, the guy is a total douchebag, the simple idea of, “homosexuality, from the standpoint of creating children, is biologically wrong”… that’s actually true. Now, to say that it will end the world and crap like that, though, that’s complete BS.
fuck Brad Lopez
@Michael: They usually are.
B
QUEERTY: ‘and said the world would end, according to the Bible, with the earth engulfed in flames, and how “that is the real global warming we should be worried about,” he was merely exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech.’
Well, if he said that the Bible claimed that “the world would end with the earth engulfed in flames,” meant as a factual statement about what the Bible contains, one can argue that this is free speech – Revelations has stars falling to earth, which is bit like describing a fall where you land on the ground by saying “the earth fell on me.” Somehow the “falling stars” only burn 1/3 of the trees, so I guess the stars must have cooled off and lost a lot of mass first. Actually, if you skim through the book of Revelations, the first thing you’ll wonder is “what sort of drugs was the author taking?”
The earth will, in a sense, end by being engulfed in flames according to some recent simulations – while the sun will expand, with a radius larger than the earth’s current
orbit, it will lose mass as well, so the earth will also move away from the sun. The
question is which wins, the expansion of the earth’s orbit or the expansion of the sun.
It looks like the sun wins, with the earth becoming kind of a solar lunch. The oceans would have boiled away well before this point, of course, and it will have become
uninhabitable far earlier. So, I guess Dr. Brad Lopez can claim he is taking a long-term view about the earth. Whatever. Any port in a storm. The smart thing for him to do is to try to steer the criticism of him towards the global warming part, so that this idiotic views about homosexuality get lost in the noise.
Curiously, there has been some serious research done on the book of Revelation, mostly involving textual analysis that suggests to some that there were multiple authors, and to others that some poor Greek in the text was merely a literary device (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation#Text_reconstruction ). None of that research indicates that you should believe a word of it. One scholar argued that the pidgin Greek in the original text was not the sort of pidgin Greek you’d expect from someone just learning the language, leading to his claim that this was a literary device. Regardless, the King James version and modern versions should have translated it into an analogous form of pidgin English, but then, if they did that, hardly anyone would take the thing seriously. It possibly got included in the Bible for political reasons.