PINEVILLE, La. ― The state appeals court in Lake Charles has dismissed a lawsuit brought by four former professors against Louisiana College, saying it’s a religious debate rather than a legal matter.
The Nov. 6 ruling affirmed a judge’s decision last year that resolving the allegations brought by James Heath, Carlton Winbery, Frederick Downing and Connie Douglas “would require an unconstitutional entanglement in a religious dispute” about whether the Bible is “inerrant,” with every word and statement true.
“It’s over unless they appeal to the Supreme Court,” Joe Aguillard, president of the Southern Baptist college in Pineville, told The Town Talk. “If they do, the Supreme Court will have to choose a religious side or say it’s not the court’s place.”
Heath, of Dry Prong, referred a query Friday from The Associated Press to attorney Victor Sooter of Alexandria, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit filed in December 2005, during Aguillard’s first year as president, alleges that the college defamed the four and violated the college’s academic freedom policy and an agreement reached in 1997 to settle a lawsuit they had brought in 1996.
In the March 2012 ruling, District Judge Mary Lauve Doggett rejected the college’s claim that it was immune to such suits because it is a church. She cited a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in an employment discrimination suit against Mississippi College another religiously oriented liberal arts school run by a state arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
However, she found that deciding whether Louisiana College officials violated the school’s academic freedom policy would require the court “to decide the `truth’ of plaintiffs’ teachings to determine whether those teachings were consistently `from God.'”
