At the University of Toledo in Ohio, administrators apparently made the mistake of hiring a bigot to administer university hiring policies which forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.
In an April 18 article in the Toledo Free Press, Crystal Davis Dixon, associate vice president for human resources for the university, declared her support for discrimination on all three counts:
- she was willing to enforce her own antigay religious views upon university employees and students possessing less-homophobic, more-genuine religious beliefs,
- despite university hiring policies to the contrary, she denied that gay people have civil rights or that discrimination victimizes them, and
- she implicitly denigrated gay African-Americans.
Dixon also denied the natural existence of intersexed and gender-variant people who might apply for jobs at the university — and threatened God’s wrath against such people:
She concluded: “My final and most important point. There is a divine order. God created human kind male and female (Genesis 1:27). God created humans with an inalienable right to choose. There are consequences for each of our choices, including those who violate God’s divine order.
Dixon was fired for flouting the policies that she was hired to enforce, and religious-right media have been in an uproar ever since — accusing the university of discriminating racially and religiously against Dixon because it would not permit her to deny religious freedom to others, nor to arbitrarily violate campus hiring and employment policies with impunity.
Two ex-gay activists have now leapt to Dixon’ defense with a bizarre assertion that antigay African-Americans somehow enjoy a special racial and religious right to discriminate against others on the basis of victims’ religion and sexual orientation, whatever local laws and employer hiring policies may say to the contrary.
