Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Madman McAdams

John McAdams, is a professor at Marquette University, teaching political science, or so I've been told. I wonder about the quality of his knowledge, since political science has to take into account sociology and human nature, as well as things like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which he apparently knows very little about.

He takes a story from the Ann Arbor News, which tells about a young woman fired from the counseling program for not doing her job, and twists it into a tale of persecution and martyrdom.

The gist of the story, which McAdams all but plagiarizes by reprinting nearly the whole thing, is about a young woman who was assigned a case of a young man troubled by things going on in his relationship with his significant other. The problem for the young lady is that he is gay, and she believes, due to her religious convictions, that homosexuality is wrong and she refused to treat him.

McAdams, and the American Defense Fund, feel that this is religious persecution.

McAdams interprets the events thus:
Of course, a liberal social worker would never be required to condone behaviors she believed to be (say) racist or sexist. We can’t imagine that a feminist social worker would be required to counsel a Muslim woman in a way that condoned fundamentalist Islamic views about relations between the sexes. And we can’t imagine that any social worker would be required to condone sexually molesting children.

But a different standard applies to Christians.

[...]

Allowing a counselor with moral objections to homosexuality to simply hand off a client to a secular liberal colleague would seem to be a reasonable accommodation to sincere religious beliefs.

But the gay lobby (and its politically correct academic acolytes) are not about tolerance. They are about orthodoxy. Everybody must think the way they want them to think — or at least be forced to pretend that they think that way — or they will be punished.
All of this, to any social worker or mental health professional, is pretty damn offensive.

What this supposedly learned man fails to recognize is that a key part of being a good counselor or therapist is being nonjudgmental. One has to put aside their personal beliefs while on duty, in order to provide the most effective and therapeutic service they can to the person in need.

This is common among many lines of works. A police officer might have feelings of hatred towards another race, but they are not supposed to let those personal feelings interfere with the way they enforce the law.

The same could be said about doctors and nurses. What if the young lady was studying to be a doctor, and a homosexual man came in with HIV. Would he condone her withholding treatment because he was gay? Of course not. Counseling is really no different. Instead of dealing with an illness of the body, she is supposed to be dealing with stress of the emotional and/or mental sort, regardless of who the patient is.

McAdams' attitude is also probably hypocritical. I have no doubt in my mind that if the young lady was attending a religious school, and refused to follow a school rule about telling the young man that he was an abomination, he would defend the school's right to have that rule, no matter how offensive it might be.

If the young lady is unable to put aside her own prejudices, whether based on a religious or personal point of view, she has no business being in that business.

Furthermore, what if the young man was in a severe emotional state and felt like hurting himself? Her rejection of him would only exasperate the problem, and might push him over the edge. Would he condone that, I wonder.

In my years in the mental health field, I have had to work with people that I would rather not have, whether they be child molesters, child abusers, drug dealers or close-minded, neurotic professors, but I did put my feelings aside for that brief time, in order to put my best effort in making my corner of the world a better place.

Too bad McAdams can't say the same.

1 comment:

  1. I don't get the sense that this McAdams character is smart enough to realize the irony of his statements.

    And a couple side notes: yet another comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia, and yet another claim of Christians being oppressed (in a country that's 84% Christian with a church on virtually every block!). Absurd all around.

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