You might remember how a week ago, in a marathon meeting that went until the wee hours, the trustees of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth decided to remove Paige Patterson as president. He was kicked upstairs to the newly-created position of president emeritus, given compensation and a house (being built on campus) for retirement.

Today, he’s OUT. All of it, GONE WITH THE WIND.

Here’s the seminary’s statement: swbts.edu

So what changed between last week and this? Some women publicly came forward and told their stories. And there was an article in the New Republic late this morning which indicated what a horrible shitshow of a place SWBTS under Patterson was for women. I’m just going to quote one woman, but the entire piece is damning as hell. You know the place has to be shit if a Marine thinks it’s awful.

Discrimination didn’t stop at the classroom door. Mary Burbrink, who says she was hired as the seminary’s first female patrol officer in 2013, described rampant discrimination at work. In a seven-page letter mailed to SWBTS trustees ahead of their decision to ease Patterson into retirement, she claimed that her supervisors regularly treated her differently because of her gender. “I remember always being sent away when we would go to calls of a serious nature. … I would arrive and would promptly be sent away by my supervisor once he arrived on scene with another officer,” she wrote.

Burbrink, a former Marine, told me that she’s used to being one of the only women in a group of men. But she said her experiences at SWBTS were unusual. She told me that she wasn’t allowed to be alone with any of her male colleagues, and that supervisors assigned her menial tasks more often than they did the men. She added that her experiences on the job reflected a general campus atmosphere toward women. “I felt like a petty annoyance on my best day, and on my worst day I felt like I was an evil seductress hell-bent on destroying the men around me, just because I was a woman,” she said, a gendered perception she believes the school actively reinforced.

She was particularly disturbed by a 2014 chapel sermon delivered by Patterson, during which he condemned women who dressed like “harlots.” “He was talking to the women,” she recalled. “And he asked us if we dress like harlots, and he said that if we dress like harlots and we cause our brothers and Christ to stumble into sin then, you know, we’re personally responsible for their sin.”

newrepublic.com