Elizabeth Hunter suffered under Bob Jones University’s homophobic discrimination. Now, she’s the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit to end
Washington Monthly gives us even more detail. Elizabeth Faith Hunter was a Junior Mass Comm major in the 2017-2018 school year.
Elizabeth Hunter had fewer than 700 Twitter followers when her Christian college administrators discovered her tweets in 2018. Officials at Bob Jones University, a nondenominational Christian school in South Carolina, called her into the Student Life Office seemingly at random. When Hunter entered, she noticed a manila envelope that contained printouts of tweets they had flagged as “inappropriate.”
The Head of Student life at BJU started the meeting with questions about a tweet she’d posted on sexual assault. (She had expressed exasperation with a male classmate who claimed women were “just looking for attention” if they came forward years after an incident.) Then, they brought up two other tweets.
Who was that Head of Student Life? Eric Newton -- Eric Newton who is still on BJU faculty despite being demoted from the administration.
“Happy pride to all my friends in and out of the closet. You’re incredibly brave, and I love you,” read one. In another, she shared her excitement after meeting the author of the novel that was adapted into Love, Simon, and said that she, too, was writing a book with queer protagonists. The administrator, according to Hunter, stared at her coldly. “Are you a homosexual?” he asked.
Hunter was choked up and unable to respond. When she was hauled before administrators, Hunter was still struggling to figure out her own identity—and had only told “like three people” she wasn’t straight. She told the administrator she was probably asexual “like the Apostle Paul” because she wasn’t attracted to men. He wasn’t satisfied. “He repeatedly asked me if I was homosexual, like he wanted me to ‘confess to being gay,’ which I refused to do,” Hunter told me. “But I also refused to say that I was straight, because I couldn’t lie.”
Can you imagine? How many BJU employees would likely call themselves the same -- "asexual, like the Apostle Paul." And Eric, are you really the person who should be initiating these kinds of terrorizing interviews?
Hunter left the meeting “traumatized.” As a punishment, the school removed the redhead with a broad smile from her leadership position as the director at the campus TV news station, fined her $75 for violating “the spirit” of the Student Handbook, and mandated that she attend three counseling sessions with the college’s Dean of Women. (The BJU Student Handbook is a rigid instruction manual for students. It says of music, for instance, “all musical choices are to be intentionally conservative in style and are to avoid the markers of our current corrupt culture which often finds its musical expression in rock, pop, jazz, country, rap or hip-hop.”) Bob Jones University did not respond to a request for comment.
We all know how this feels. We were all exactly in this position at one point at BJU.
For the remainder of her time at the university, Hunter “tried to keep [her] head down,” she recalls; putting her Twitter on private. But before graduation she was summoned to another meeting with administrators, where they warned her “don’t think we’re not watching you” and “your sins will find you out.” Those Orwellian tactics succeeded at intimidating her; she felt like she couldn’t tell anyone else what had happened, not even her roommate. “I had no one to turn to,” Hunter said.
At most colleges, she would have been able to go to the school’s Title IX office and file a discrimination complaint. But even though most of Hunter’s tuition at Bob Jones was paid for by a federal grant, the school’s Title IX Office had a “religious exemption” from federal law requiring them to investigate claims of discrimination and harassment against LGBTQ people.
But Hunter’s not silent anymore. Three years after that meeting, she is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Department of Education challenging the constitutionality of Title IX, which grants an exemption to religious colleges and universities to discriminate against gay and transgender students, faculty, and staff.
BJU is not safe, friends.
