NMSU being sued by a former lesbian for discrimination
She also said homosexuality is "wrong" and sports are "evil."
Quote:A former University of Southern California point guard, Camille LeNoir, alleges she was denied an assistant coaching job in the New Mexico State University athletic department because of her sexual orientation. This week, a federal judge in California decided to allow her discrimination case to advance.
LeNoir’s case is proceeding just four months after Jane Meyer, the former senior associate athletic director at the University of Iowa, won $1.43 million in a landmark Title IX lawsuit over gender and sexual orientation discrimination.
But LeNoir and Meyer aren’t making exactly the same arguments. LeNoir says she was discriminated against because the head coach found out that she is a Christian who no longer identifies as homosexual.
In 2009, after she graduated from USC, LeNoir was a second-round draft pick by the Washington Mystics. She never made it onto a WNBA roster, however, and ended up going overseas, where she had a successful professional basketball career in Greece.
In April 2016, Mark Trakh, who had coached LeNoir at USC and who was working at the time as NMSU’s head women’s basketball coach, extended an oral job offer to LeNoir to join him at NMSU. But days before LeNoir was scheduled to fly out to NMSU to formally discuss the hiring process, a lesbian assistant coach on the staff showed Trakh a YouTube video of LeNoir discussing her sexuality and religious beliefs. Soon thereafter, Trakh rescinded the offer.
In the 2011 video, which is still available online, LeNoir discusses being “delivered” from the “lifestyle” of being gay, describes homosexuality as “wrong.”
“If you are in a same-sex relationship, it is not worth losing your soul,” she advises in the video. Being in such a relationship “will be the death of you,” she says, but she believes “you can overcome and defeat sin.”
LeNoir’s testimony was picked up by multiple anti-LGBTQ sites that promote “ex-gay” narratives and challenge the notion that Christianity can be accepting of gay people.
“If you believe you were born gay or homosexual or whatever — if you feel you were born that way — I would say that you weren’t. God wouldn’t create you homosexual, then say in the Bible that it’s wrong, and then send you to Hell.” Suggesting it’s a choice, she concludes, “Don’t be deceived, and God can heal you.”
NMSU denies that LeNoir’s offer was revoked because of her sex, sexual orientation, or religion — and further argues that it was not bound by the informal oral offer anyway. Trakh made the offer “outside of NMSU’s job posting procedures,” the university contends, which require a public posting and standard recruitment process. “Therefore, irrespective of the online video, Ms. LeNoir very well may not have been hired,” the university concludes.
But the lawsuit does say that Trakh advised LeNoir to take down the video, noting that the video “would make it difficult for her to find a job in women’s college basketball.”
That seems to be a fair statement. After all, not only does LeNoir say horrendous things about homosexuality, she also declares that she is leaving professional sports because “God — He has shown me just how evil sports really are.” She says that sports are laden with “idol worship, greed, the level of money, the hatred, the envy” and she could not be “equally yoked with non-believers.” She explains that “competition came from Satan, not from God,” and that “everything that Jesus preached from the Sermon on the Mount contradicts everything the sports atmosphere promotes. Everything.”
In the lawsuit, LeNoir says she stands by her comments, which she describes as “intimately personal and an expression of her love for her faith and how she identified herself sexually.”
New Mexico state law, as well as NMSU’s own policies, prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It would be wrong for LeNoir to lose an opportunity to coach merely because of her personal religious beliefs and her heterosexual orientation — but it’s also understandable why a team with openly LGBTQ assistant coaches that is trying to cultivate an inclusive environment would be wary of LeNoir’s extremely vocal position that homosexuality is a sin and that gay people need to be rescued. Likewise, it’s hard to see how a coach that blatantly describes professional sports as evil and says that competition came from Satan would be a good fit in any locker room.
But, for now, LeNoir’s lawsuit will press onward. She is requesting $6 million in damages.
RE: NMSU being sued by a former lesbian for discrimination
Title of this thread makes it sound like she's a former lesbian and suing NMSU because of it. That would have added a whole new dimension to this story.
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NMSU being sued by a former lesbian for discrimination
