You may have already heard the story of Jason Johnson, a gay student who was expelled from the fundamentalist University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky.  You may have heard this university claims the right to treat any of its students like less then dog shit because…hey…they’re a private institution and they don’t have to answer to any of those damn secular civil rights and equal opportunity laws.  You may have heard further that the University of the Cumberlands is slated to get a sweetheart 11 million dollars of Kentucky tax payer money from the state assembly this year…it’s status as a private institution willing to discriminate against any citizen of Kentucky it damn well pleases to notwithstanding.  God says it’s okay to steal money from the heathens.

What you may not have also heard, and which attracted my attention just a few moments ago while reading this article about the incident, is that the University of the Cumberlands is apparently also quite willing to lie through their teeth about Jason’s school record…

The summer after his freshman year, he came out to his parents and returned to campus as an openly gay man.

"I just knew that I couldn’t go back to hiding again. I wanted to be out," said Johnson, adding that he never experienced harassment or conflict because of his sexual orientation. "Being gay is part of who I am, but not the totality of who I am."

Johnson posted messages about his boyfriend and being gay on his profile at MySpace. com, and school administrators eventually saw the Web site; Johnson doesn’t know how they found it. They confronted him last week with a printout of the site, an order to leave the school and failing grades for a semester that probably would have ended with honors.

The university did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.

(Emphasis mine) Okay…it’s one thing to say that an openly gay student doesn’t conform to your school’s religious teachings.  It’s one thing to expel that student.  But it’s quite another to claim in his transcripts to any other school he might want to attend, that he failed classes which in fact he was doing quite well in, but which in fact you did not permit him to finish.  No…you mark the semester as incomplete, and if you’re ashamed to go into detail about why this particular student didn’t complete the semester you let it go at that.  But you don’t say he failed, because he didn’t.  He wasn’t allowed to finish.

The word for what University of the Cumberlands is doing here….is lie.  The word for people who do that sort of thing…is liars.  But the word from the pulpits in America now, is that it’s okay to lie through your teeth about homosexuals, and god won’t mind.

Morals.  Values.  Who would Jesus slander?