"Omaha Public
School board member Marian Fey said (Susan) Colvin told her staff Wednesday she
will take an administrative job at the district headquarters.
"I think the story had become more about her and less about the school,” Fey said.
Fey
cannot discuss specific personnel matters, but credits Colvin on her
commitment to improve test scores even more than she already has to make
Nathan Hale look better in the community."
And so this principal was shielding a child rapist, and she gets a nice, comfortable job in the TAC building. She is in turn being shielded by the School Board. Improving test scores is more important than the safety of children.
Isn't it ironic that if these were men in roman collars the outrage would be a national issue? Test scores versus child abuse? Really!?!
It's all about the optics, as the politicos like to say. As long as no one is reported for child abuse, it doesn't exist in the schools. The test scores make the school look better. That's what is really important.
Millstones all around.
Of course this kind of thinking on the part of adults does lead to children acting out. Yes it is a different school, but the entire upper administration, including the Omaha Public School Board has been colluding to protect not just bad teachers, but abusive teachers. It has been so bad that the State of Nebraska passed a law on February 11 of 2013 requiring a reduction in the number of school board members, and that all board members face an election as soon as possible.
And then there's this story. In a world where child-on-child sexual assault is increasingly prevalent, do we really want young people forced to act out some guest speaker's sexual fantasies? This guest speaker created a hostile environment in the classroom by forcing students to participate in sexual behavior that is counter to the 'sexual orientation' of, presumably, most of the girls.
From the Department of Education's own sexual harassment guide:
Thus, it can be discrimination on the basis of sex to harass a student
on the basis of the victim’s failure to conform to stereotyped notions
of masculinity and femininity.
This speaker forced these students to act out on homosexual stereotypes. Where are the lawyers when you need them?
Maybe a well educated Muslim extremest in our military asked permission to remove the citation. Maybe it was a former Evangelical or Catholic who lodged the complaint because his inner-demons were disturbed. Maybe it was a radical atheist who fights against any mention of God.
Regardless of the origin of the complaint, to require all of the offending letters and numbers to be removed is ludicrous. If the complainers believed the citations had no meaning, then why complain? The only way this matters is if someone is afraid of the Word of God.
If one lesson can be learned from the First Amendment and the case law that has interpreted it, it is this: You do not have a right to not be offended.
For many Catholic schools we are at the tail end of contract season. The season generally begins in early March with teachers being asked to declare whether they intend to return, and in April, they are either presented with a contract for the next year, or not. The timing of these contract offers is significant when looking at stories like this one.
I would expect many stories like this during our current season, but I'm probably going to be disappointed. Why the expectation? Why the disappointment?
First I should say, I wasn't expecting every person with same-sex attraction to be outed and denied a contract at Catholic schools. Some live celibate lives, teach from a solid Catholic faith, and are wonderful teachers. This isn't a gay witch-hunt. It really shouldn't be. It needs to be something deeper.
My expectation, or maybe hope is more accurate, is a feeble thing. I pray that Catholic schools will become bastions of passing on the Magisterium of the Catholic Faith. I pray the the teachers in our schools will by thought, word and deed, transmit the faith to young people in a way that weaves it into the very fabric of their young souls. I hoped that the real discrimination Catholics are experiencing under our government at this time would awaken the strength of the hidden saint in all of us, especially teachers. But that isn't what is happening.
The HHS mandate as it is written requires all employees of Catholic schools to be profoundly Catholic, or the entire school, and in most cases the parish, must contribute with school and parish dollars, to the culture of death. If they refuse to comply, they must either close the school or submit. My expectation was that schools would be holding onto their contracts, or including a caveat that if the mandate is not undone, there would be no jobs for heretics.
Wouldn't that be a powerful testament to our faith? What if a bishop somewhere announced that the Catholic schools in an entire diocese would close if they didn't stand against the HHS mandate in hiring practices? Wouldn't that be the ultimate throw-down?
Instead, too many of our Catholic school children will continue to hear from their teachers about how they voted for Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Biden, or any of the other advocates of death. These nice men and women will explain that they did it because they want to help the poor. These nice teachers will be attractive young mothers and fathers, or maybe grandparents with pictures of the 1.8 grandchildren on their desks. They may never have discussed their votes with the pastor, but they sure do mention it in class. They will be the Eucharistic Ministers that give Communion to students at school Masses.
My expectation, my feeble hope was that the media would be buzzing with stories of hundreds of teachers who did not have their contracts renewed. The Catholic blogs would be going nuts with stories of beloved teachers who are being denied Communion in front of their students. These teachers would take to Facebook and Twitter talking about the big-bad-pastor who told them they couldn't be Eucharistic Ministers at school Masses.
My disappointment is that, by not seeing these stories, Catholic schools are no longer any different from public schools.
Last week NYU Law announced that former Weather Underground member and
convicted murderer Kathy Boudin would be a scholar-in-residence. She’s
the latest in a series of former left-wing radicals with cozy university
appointments. Michael Moynihan on how left-wing criminals ended up
lecturing America’s college students.
Last
week, Rutgers University fired its mercurial basketball coach after he
was videotaped “shoving, grabbing and throwing balls at players in
practice and using gay slurs,” according to ESPN.
Under pressure from school administrators, Rutgers’ athletic director,
who had previously defended the coach’s behavior, resigned. It was an
appropriate response: violent oafs should be fired from their university
jobs for violent, oafish behavior.
Weather Underground fugitive Katherine Boudin is taken into custody
by police on October 21, 1981. (Carmine Donofrio/NY Daily News Archive
via Getty)
On the same day ESPN broadcast the Rutgers tape, The New York Postreported
that Kathy Boudin, a professor at Columbia University, was named the
2013 Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at NYU Law School. In 1984, Boudin, a
member of the Weather Underground, a violent, oafish association of
upper-class “revolutionaries,” pled guilty to second-degree murder in
association with the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack,
New York. Babbling in the language of anti-racism and anti-imperialism,
Boudin assisted in ending the life of three people, including Waverly
Brown, the first black police officer on the Nyack police force, and
left nine children fatherless. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in
prison. In 2003, Boudin was released; by 2008 she had landed a coveted
teaching position at an Ivy League university.
Indeed, Boudin’s Columbia University biography
doesn’t mention her violent past, describing her simply as “an educator
and counselor with experience in program development since 1964,
working within communities with limited resources to solve social
problems.” Neither does an official NYU press release
announcing her new gig, instead explaining that Boudin “has been
dedicated to community involvement in social change since the 1960’s.”
Well, that’s one way of putting it. (Boudin didn’t respond to an interview request.)
Kick
a student on the basketball court and you’ll lose your university job.
Spend two decades in prison on radical chic murder rap and you’ll get
one.
Let’s
be clear: Private colleges can hire whomever they like, though one
suspects that a Pinochet loyalist, a propagandist for Franco, or a
far-right bomber—where academic jobs are scarce—wouldn’t make the
shortlist of candidates at Columbia or NYU. In fact, there is a rather
ignoble tradition within academia of welcoming those with fringe views
and violent backgrounds, provided their politics were “misguided” in the
appropriate direction.
Here's a quick look at Kathy Boudin and other 60s radicals turned professors.
The
most famous Weather Underground bombers-cum-professors are, of course,
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (also a former Sheinberg
Scholar-in-Residence at NYU, which must consider bomb-making skills when
making its selection), whose infantile politics and tenure on the FBI’s
Most Wanted List never dented the confidence of the University of
Illinois or Northwestern University.
Ayers
and Dohrn have long maintained that their bombing campaigns never
deliberately targeted people, a claim that elides a rather important
event: the famous 1970 explosion at a Weather bomb factory in New York
City that killed three people, all of whom were constructing nail-packed
pipe bombs for deployment at an army dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The
goal was to blind, maim, and kill. Boudin was present, but escaped the
explosion and evaded capture. She insisted during her 2003 parole
hearing, against logic and and all available evidence, that she was
unaware the house was being used to construct bombs.
In a fair-minded piece for LA Weekly, journalist Peter Jamison reported
that investigators also believed an unsolved 1970 bombing of a San
Francisco police station, which killed one officer and blinded another,
could be tied back to Ayers and Dohrn. According to Jamison, “two
credible eyewitnesses—both former left-wing radicals tied to the
Weathermen—gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s
alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group,
were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack.”
This is the front page of a Chicago Police Department Daily Bulletin
issued April 9, 1970, showing eight members of the Weathermen faction
of the SDS who are being sought on warrants charging aggravated battery
on police officers. (Chicago Police Dept/AP)
Ayers,
Dohrn, and Machtiger spent most of the 1970s “underground,” attempting
to avoid prosecution on a variety of charges (including a foiled attempt
to bomb the Detroit Police Officers Association Building) and Jamison
says that the three “were all targets of a secret federal grand jury
investigation in 2003” into the police station bombing. It might not
surprise you that, before retiring, Machtinger was a professor at North
Carolina Central University and Teaching Fellows Director at University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s School of Education. According to
Jamison, Ayers, Dohrn, and Machtiger all refused repeated requests to
comment on the case.
Or
take former Black Panther party grandee Ericka Huggins, who is now a
professor of women’s studies at California State University, a professor
of sociology at Laney and Berkeley City College, and, according to one official biography, a “human rights activist.” In 2011, students at the University of Kentucky could receive extra credit
for attending a lecture by Huggins, described as a “political prisoner
and human rights activist.” It does not seem to bother these
universities that in 1970 Huggins was brought to trial on charges of
“aiding and abetting” the murder of Alex Rackley, a fellow Panther they
wrongly believed to be a police informant. She was acquitted.
But
a few salient facts aren’t disputed: After days of “interrogation,”
Rackley was brutally tortured—beaten mercilessly, boiling water poured
on his naked body—and left to marinate in his own blood, urine, and
feces. As a warning to other “traitors,” one torture session was
audiotaped. In the scratchy recording recovered by police, Huggins can
be heard recalling when she “began to realize how phony [Rackley] was
and that he was either an extreme fool or a pig, so we began to ask
questions with a little force and the answers came out after a few
buckets of hot water.” During the session, Rackley was tied to his chair
with a gun pointed at him. As he shifted nervously, Huggins snapped,
“Sit down motherfucker. Keep still.” (A copy of the tape was recently
discovered in a Connecticut house and can be listened to here).
After 16 years in prison, her sentence was commuted by President
Bill Clinton and, not long after, the self-identified “human rights
activist” took a position teaching at John Jay College.
In their book Murder in the Model City, authors Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae describe
a broken Rackley being led out of the house two days after the taped
session, to be driven to his execution site in a nearby marsh: “From her
perch by the kitchen counter, Ericka Huggins, the highest-ranking
female Panther in town, watched [Panthers George] Sams and Warren
[Kimbro] walk Rackley out the door. Sam brandished the .45 automatic as
he held Rackley’s arms, which were tied together with ropes.” Warren
Kimbro shot Alex Rackley in the head. He later confessed to the murder
and was sentenced to life in prison, but only served four years. By
1975, he was an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State University.
After
years on the run, having been indicted for her involvement in the
Brinks robbery and murder in Nyack, Weather Underground member Susan
Rosenberg was caught in 1985 moving “740 pounds of dynamite and weapons,
including a submachine gun,” according toThe New York Times,
from her car into a storage locker. After 16 years in prison, her
sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton and, not long after, the
self-identified “human rights activist” took a position teaching at
John Jay College. After her contract wasn’t renewed, she found a perch
at Hamilton College, though furious opposition by some faculty members
forced the administration to withdraw the offer. But no hard feelings
from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Interdisciplinary Studies
Program, which in 2011 invited students “to a celebration of Susan Rosenberg” upon the release of her memoir.
Former
Weather Underground member Eleanor Raskin, who fled after being
indicted for bomb making in the 1970s, is an associate professor at
Albany Law School. In 1981, Raskin and her husband were arrested in
connection with an explosives cache uncovered two years earlier by New
Jersey police (her husband was placed on probation; the charges against
Raskin were dropped). After years in hiding, Mark Rudd, a Weather leader
who also fled indictment and went “underground,” turned himself in 1977
and was sentenced to two years’ probation. He later taught at Central
New Mexico Community College.
And on it goes. Perhaps you detect a pattern developing here?
They might have been violent charlatans, but they were violent charlatans in search of a bettersociety.
They might resist providing a full and proper accounting of their
crimes, but most will concede that their tactics might have been
misguided and offer qualified repentance, but insist that their instincts were correct.
So
go ahead and commit a crime, “expropriate” a bank. Just make sure you
leave an incoherent manifesto at the scene, claiming that you’re
shooting your guns and filling your pockets with loot for the people. When caught, you won’t be a convicted murderer, but a “political prisoner.” And when released, you can be a college professor.
What is the point of 'coming out' for people who identify as homosexual?
1. To silence the opposition. (From Courageous Priest.)
Two gay seniors at George Washington University say they feel
alienated because the chaplain at George Washington’s Newman Center
rejects homosexuality, and they aren’t going to take it anymore.
The seniors, Damian Legacy and Blake Bergen, have announced a
coordinated campaign to rid the campus of the Roman Catholic priest,
reports The GW Hatchet, the school’s independent student newspaper.
They also assert that 12 or more students have quit the Newman Center in recent years because they can’t tolerate Father Greg Shaffer’s ardent anti-gay “and, for the record, anti-abortion beliefs.”
Shaffer has worked for five years at George Washington’s Newman
Center. He told the Hatchet that religion and unrestricted speech “play a
vital role at a diverse university like GW.”
Legacy and Bergen say they are primarily upset about the counseling
Shaffer offers. They say he urges students who have homosexual feelings
to lead a life of celibacy.
Catholic Church doctrine maintains that homosexual desire isn’t a sin, but acting on that desire is, according to the website Catholic.com.
Legacy told the Hatchet that he spent considerable time at the Newman
Center during his first two years at George Washington. He was an altar
server at mass. He believed that he would become a Catholic priest
after graduating.
All that changed, though, when Legacy told Shaffer that he and Bergen
had entered a homosexual relationship. Shaffer allegedly charged Legacy
with being immoral and lacking in faith.
“To have my faith leader view me that way, just because of one piece
of the way that God made me, and to think that one part is responsible
for the destruction of my human dignity, it just didn’t…I can’t even
begin to describe the mental conflict that it creates,” Legacy told the
Hatchet.
The two gay seniors are also unhappy about a blog post Shaffer authored back in May 2012, just after President Barack Obama publicly endorsed gay marriage.
“As Vatican II states, God is the author of marriage. He has defined
marriage as between a man and a woman,” Shaffer then wrote. “Every
single rational person knows that sexual relationships between persons
of the same sex are unnatural and immoral. They know it in their
hearts.”
The plan to oust Shaffer includes the creation of a video containing
the statements of several students who have left GW’s Newman Center.
That video, Legacy and Bergen hope, will surely arouse the generally
left-leaning campus to anger, thus forcing school officials to act.
Other aspects of the proposed GW Newman Center insurgency include
filing a formal complaint with the administration and conducting a
series of prayer vigils outside the center.
Legacy and Bergen will also distribute a letter to high-ranking
administrators. According to The Hatchet, the letter will cite academic
studies connecting homophobic behavior to loss of appetite, insomnia and
other detrimental psychological consequences.
Finally, Legacy will request that GW’s Student Association defund the
Newman Center (which is affiliated with the school but officially part
of the Roman Catholic Church). This year, the Center reportedly
collected $10,000 in funding.
Last semester, Legacy presented a report to the school’s Office for
Diversity and Inclusion explaining that other schools, such as New York
University, vet and evaluate religious leaders before allowing them to
work with campus affiliated groups.
2. To charge a group with hate crimes. This army training presentation lists CATHOLICS as an extremist hate group. It recommends that army personnel avoid participating in meetings or fundraising efforts with the groups on the list. See page five, where army personnel are PROHIBITED from Participating in a public demonstration or rally, attending a meeting or activity, fundraising, recruiting or training, taking a leadership role, or distributing literature for any extremist group. Then see page 24 for the list of extremist groups that includes Catholicism.
3. To force what they view as TOLERANCE, meaning, "You must shut up about any objections you have to me or my life. I will be in your face everyday forcing you to see me and my lifestyle. I will do it in a way that forces you to explain to your children what homosexuality is, and violate your desire to keep your child innocent of my sexual activities."
4. To stop heterosexuals from expressing any interest in them?
5. As a public, free, personal ad for sex partners?
