Catholic university tells unmarried couple to get separate rooms on trip

[Maranatha]

Catholic university tells unmarried couple to get separate rooms on trip

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Two University of St. Thomas professors quit a trip with students to Australia after their Roman Catholic school required them to book separate rooms.

Ellen Kennedy, 57, and Leigh Lawton, 61, who live together as an unmarried couple, have taken such trips before but this time the school required separate rooms. The couple bowed out last week, saying that pretending to sleep apart would be deceitful, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. Neither is Catholic.

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[Guar_Fan]

Months before, St. Thomas told a lesbian conductor she couldn’t bring her partner on a choir tour to France after a few students complained.

Officials acknowledge the travel policy is ambiguous. For example, it’s unclear whether it covers professional conferences or only instances when students are traveling.

But theology professor David Landry wrote in a recent faculty newsletter, “If sin and vice become disqualifying factors for university employees, then students might have to start teaching themselves.”

I was all ready to praise the university, until I read that last bit from the theology(!) professor. Oh heck, the university still deserves praise for being consistent.

I hope the students are still able to go on the trip - it wouldn’t be right to punish them for Kennedy and Lawton’s inability to keep apart for a few days.

I will repost the link to the news article because the one in the OP forwarded me to Microsoft.

thenewstribune.com/24hour/religion/story/3043239p-11737084c.html

 

[MikeWM]

Guar Fan:

I will repost the link to the news article because the one in the OP forwarded me to Microsoft.

thenewstribune.com/24hour/religion/story/3043239p-11737084c.html

That’s a Firefox ‘feature’ - going to the address abcdef/ will do a search for the term abcdef using Google and go to the first result (I was going to use ‘xxx’ there but then thought better of it

In the dodgy URL http was repeated, and the first thing that comes up on searching Google for ‘http’ is Microsoft.

Mike

 

[Friar_David_O.Carm]

Guar Fan:

I was all ready to praise the university, until I read that last bit from the theology(!) professor. Oh heck, the university still deserves praise for being consistent.

I hope the students are still able to go on the trip - it wouldn’t be right to punish them for Kennedy and Lawton’s inability to keep apart for a few days.

I will repost the link to the news article because the one in the OP forwarded me to Microsoft.

thenewstribune.com/24hour/religion/story/3043239p-11737084c.html

I see nothing wrong with what the theology professor said. The main thing to keep in mind here is that what the paper printed as what the theology professor said was taken from a faculty newsletter. We do not know if the paper got the quote right and we do not know what else the professor said.

In a way, I can agree with what the professor said. I would go on to add though that we do not have to support or encourage those sins of the university employees, which is what the University is doing in this case.

As for punishing the students. The university is doing no such thing. If the trip is canceled it would be canceled because two adults could not keep their hands off each other for a couple of days. Because they wished to act immoral on a Catholic University sponsored trip.