In case you missed it, Associated Press is reporting this morning that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served on the board of a private school chain that pursued discriminatory policies toward children.
This from the story by reporters Michelle R. Smith and Michael Biesecker:
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren’t welcome in the classroom.
The policies that discriminated against LGBTQ people and their children were in place for years at Trinity Schools Inc., both before Barrett joined the board in 2015 and during the time she served.
The three schools, in Indiana, Minnesota and Virginia, are affiliated with People of Praise, an insular community rooted in its own interpretation of the Bible, of which Barrett and her husband have been longtime members. At least three of the couple’s seven children have attended the Trinity School at Greenlawn, in South Bend, Indiana.
The story goes on to provide detailed information about the way Trinity Schools practiced discrimination and delivered downright horrific messages to the children it did admit.
Several former students of varying ages who attend all three Trinity schools separately described being taught a vivid reading from Dante’s “Inferno” that depicts the eternal suffering of Sodomites condemned to hell for their sins. Four of them said teachers made clear the passage referred to gay men who were rightly suffering in hell. Some more recent graduates of the Minnesota school, however, said their teacher did not dwell on the passage.
One Trinity graduate even told of being forced to undergo “conversion therapy” after school administrators learned he was gay.
This is, in a word, outrageous. Just as it should and would disqualify Barrett if she served on the board of a school that discriminated against children based upon the race of their parents, so too should it disqualify her to have approved of such ignorant and intolerant policies toward the children of LGBTQ parents.
Especially on a day in which even Pope Francis stated that gay people are the “children of God” and endorsed same-sex civil unions, Barrett’s support of such hateful discrimination should sound the death knell for her nomination.
Click here to read the full story.
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