Wheaton prof didn't deserve suspension

In her Jan. 18 letter, Patty Bertrand commented on Wheaton College Professor Larycia Hawkins who is being disciplined for stating that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. Ms. Bertrand declares that Muslims believe in a god called Allah but do not believe, as Christians do, that Jesus is the Son of God.

But there is a problem here in that not all people do believe in Jesus as the Son of God. I would refer Ms. Bertrand to the beliefs of our country's founders. Thus Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to his friend John Adams, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

Then we can move on to John Adams' famous letter of 1817 to Thomas Jefferson in which Adams wrote, "Twenty times in the course of my late readings have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all worlds if there were no religion in it!'"

And then Jefferson in his draft of the Declaration of Independence wrote that "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," but in reviewing it Benjamin Franklin struck out the words "sacred and undeniable" and substituted the final words "self-evident."

So my conclusion is that we permit Prof. Hawkins to declare her own religious views, and let us treat her with respect as we also do other Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Baha'is and members of other faiths. She did not deserve to be suspended as a Wheaton College faculty member.

Theodore M. Utchen

Wheaton