Spartanburg is truly the center of the American Taliban. The recent story about a Spartanburg SC soup kitchen that turned away atheists who wanted to volunteer, brought to mind several incidents about why my wife and I left Spartanburg last year. I created this thread to recount some of my experiences in Spartanburg. I wont be listing them all in this opening post, as to describe them all would require more space than is allowed in an OP. Ill include the rest in subsequent posts. In this OP, Ill start with the most recent event, and work backwards from there. Its the event that precipitated our move out of Spartanburg. In 2008 I volunteered to start a clinic in a center in Boiling Springs, SC (a suburb of Spartanburg). I ran the clinic for two years. This particular resource center was owned by the Spartanburg County School District #2. In addition to the family therapy clinic, it also had a food bank, a teen pregnancy center, English as a Foreign Language classes, GED classes, etc. all paid for by donations, grants, and taxpayer funding. Since it is partially supported by taxes, it is legally required to be secular, and not religious, in nature. As you will soon see, they are clearly in violation of the law in this regard. As head of the clinic, one of my duties was to attend monthly staff meetings. About four months into my tenure as Clinical Services Coordinator for the center, I was at one of the staff meetings when someone asked the inevitable question asked here in the land of the American Taliban: What church do you go to? At the time, I was attending a Unitarian Universalist Church. Its known in Spartanburg as that gay church, because about 1/3 of the membership is LGBT-Q, and the local chapter of PFLAG meets there. After it was revealed that I went to this church, the date of the staff meeting was changed, and I was not informed of the new schedule. I emailed the Director and asked about the new schedule, but my email was never answered. From that point on I was never invited to another staff meeting, and the center stopped referring people to the clinic. My contract with the clinic was for two years. At the end of that two years, I chose not to renew, as the Director and the Board made it a very hostile environment to work in. One of the Board members, the wife of a fundamentalist Christian Republican politician from Spartanburg, even asked at the Open House for the clinic: So youll be providing Christian counseling, right? I had to explain to her that it would be unethical for me to focus on only one religion. She seemed highly dissatisfied with my answer, and stormed off in a huff. Anyway, my contract with the clinic ended in 2010, and I chose not to renew. In 2012 I began working on the requirements for my supervisors license. One of my supervisees worked at the clinic in question, and I contacted the Director of the center (or attempted to, she wouldnt return my calls) about scheduling a regular time to come to the clinic to do supervision. This was a free service I would be providing to my supervisee. Since I could never get the Director on the phone, I finally contacted her assistant. Her assistant told me that my services were not welcome at their center, and that I shouldnt call back. I should point out that the clinic at that center is owned and operated by an agency that has nothing to do with the center, other than getting space for the operation of the clinic. One of the stipulations of the contract is that the agency in question runs the clinic. The center does not, and cannot, make policy decisions on what happens at the clinic. To do so would constitute a conflict of interest. So the center violated the contract. Not only that, but my supervisee has to drive thirty miles out of the way for supervision because the center wont allow me to do supervision on the premises, all because Im not a fundamentalist Christian.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 16:59:52 +0000
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