A Manhattan judge has thrown out an arbitrator’s “shocking” ruling suspending an openly gay high school librarian for conduct the judge said would have gone unpunished if committed by a heterosexual woman.

After finding that Christopher Asch had engaged in non-sexual but inappropriate touching of students, a hearing officer had suspended the tenured librarian at Stuyvesant High School for six months without pay and ordered him to attend counseling on teacher-student physical boundaries.