A professor who says he is no longer gay is suing a university that fired him after his colleagues became aware of that. Daniel Mattson is a former professor and music performer at Western Michigan University. University officials fired Mr. Mattson in 2022 over his writing outside of work on the subject of same sex attraction and Catholicism.
Now, Mattson, represented by the Center for Individual Rights, is suing Western Michigan University in federal court. The suit alleges that officials violated Mattson’s First Amendment rights of speech, and religious expression as well as his right to equal protection under the law.
Mattson is a world-class trombonist who performed with different school-affiliated ensembles at WMU since 1999. Unrelated to his work at WMU, Mattson wrote an autobiographical book in 2017 describing his return to Catholicism after spending most of his adulthood in a homosexual lifestyle (Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace). Mattson holds traditional Catholic views on homosexuality and advocates sympathetic engagement with same-sex-attracted individuals. In September 2021, a recently appointed music faculty member and LGBT activist, Lauron Kehrer, discovered Mattson’s work and objected to his religious viewpoint on sexuality. Using social media, she initiated a campaign to cancel a recital that
Mattson was scheduled to perform as a special guest artist. She posted on Twitter, “I won’t be going to any recitals by ex-gay activists, thanks.” Additionally, she led a class discussion about how Mattson’s ideas were damaging to the LGBT community.
In response to the protest, then-Director of the School of Music Keith Kothman sent a campus-wide email condemning Mattson’s beliefs as “harmful to members of our LGBTQ community.” Kothman assured students that they would not have to attend Mattson’s guest artist recital — which is ordinarily mandatory for students who work in the same area as the guest artist. Whereas normally about 20 students attend such recitals, only one attended Mattson’s event.
Kothman removed Mattson entirely from Western Winds, a joint student-faculty ensemble, which is a subset of the Wind Symphony at WMU. Kothman then declined to renew Mattson’s contract for the following term.
Even though Mattson never expressed his religious views on campus, he was maligned and punished solely for expressing orthodox Catholic teaching on his own time. Mattson’s lawyers at CIR filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. Terence Pell, President of the Center for Individual Rights, said, “Daniel Mattson’s off work speech explaining his religious views is at the heart of the First Amendment. Individuals have a right to engage in religious expression without interference by political activists or disapproving school officials.”
As The College Fix notes:
Mattson is not the first professor to be scrutinized by universities after expressing controversial opinions outside of the classroom.
In 2018, Marquette University Professor John McAdams was reinstated after a legal battle with the university over his firing. McAdams was ousted from his position “for writing a blog post that criticized a fellow instructor by name,” The College Fix reported.
“I don’t apologize for telling the truth,” McAdams said after winning the lawsuit. “I hope they take the fact that you can speak out and you can tell the truth even if university bureaucrats don’t like it if you are willing to stick to your guns.”
In 2021, a formal investigation was opened at the University of San Diego into a law professor after he authored a blog post critical of the Chinese Communist Party. This came after a petition circulated demanding his firing.
University of San Diego ultimately rejected calls to fire Professor Tom Smith, stating his comments were protected by the university’s speech policies.
