Racial Sleaze in Dallas

We don’t frequently read Dallas publications, but we happened across one just today, and it contained an article about greedy black politicians playing the race card, all the while trying to line their pockets.

It was really a racial protection racket.

And the Dallas Morning News went along with it, siding with the race hustlers.

Does any of this sound familiar to Milwaukeeans?

Campus Indoctrination at Delaware

Simon Harak: Leftist Marquette Faculty “Peace” Activist Against Military Robots

Simon Harak is a hard left “peace activist” ensconced in Marquette’s Center for Peacemaking.

In fact, his notion of “peace” is that America should never fight anybody. He has little bad to say about America’s enemies, and has even defended Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

He is much more a leftist than a peace activist.

At any rate, Harak is recently been vocal in opposing the U.S. military’s use of robots in combat.

Some argue that military robotics will also increase the threat of terrorism. “If people know that they are going to be killed by these robots,” argues Fr. G. Simon Harak, director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, “then why would they not therefore retaliate against civilian centers in the United States? It only makes military sense that they’ll find where we are vulnerable.”

Of course, they have been trying to do this for a couple of decades now, and without much success since the Bush Administration’s clamp down on terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

More than anything else, the prospect of U.S. troops dying on some far-off battlefield limits public support for military force. Therefore, if the number of soldiers coming home in body bags can be significantly reduced, then the public will probably pay even less attention to foreign policy and future wars. This will in turn make it easier for politicians to start wars.

For instance, John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, recently wrote in the Washington Post that robots would allow the United States to intervene militarily in Darfur or other hot spots where politicians are currently reluctant to send flesh-and-blood soldiers.

Another hard-left periodical, Mother Jones also quotes Harak.

The Rev. G. Simon Harak, an ethicist and the director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, says, “Effectively, what these remote control robots are doing is removing people farther and farther from the consequences of their actions.”

Translation: if America goes to war, fewer Americans will be killed. For Harak, this is a bad thing.

Moreover, the similarity that the robots have to the life-like video games that young people grow up playing will blur reality further.

“If guys in the field already have difficulties distinguishing between civilians and combatants,” Harak asks, “what about when they are looking through a video screen?”

It is not only possible but likely that a surge of armed robots would lead to an increase in the number of civilian casualties, not a decrease.

The supposed conversation-ender that armed robots will save U.S. lives isn’t nearly as clear as it is often presented, either. “If you take a narrow view, fewer soldiers would die,” Harak says, “but that would be only on the battlefield.”

As happens in every war, however, those facing new technology will adapt to them.

“If those people being attacked feel helpless to strike at the robots themselves, they will try to strike at their command centers,” Harak says, “which might well be back in the United States or among civilian centers. That would then displace the battlefield to manufacturing plants and research facilities at universities where such things are being invented or assembled… The whole notion that we can be invulnerable is just a delusion.”

Harak somehow believes that terrorists, who have been trying to strike the American homeland, and dearly want to strike the Amercan homeland, would somehow gain the capability of doing so if the U.S. military uses robots.

Of course, under Obama, they may very well gain that capability. But if so, they will use it, robots or no robots.

Harak, it seems, is so anti-American that he actually wants any American intervention to create more American casualties. “Peace” is no part of his agenda. Hating America is.

Obama’s Illusion

Felons and the Right to Vote

Tonight, in Cudahy Hall, Room 001 at 7:00 p.m., there is a presentation by Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project titled “Losing the Vote: Felony Disenfranchisement and American Democracy,”

The Sentencing Project is a liberal operation that doesn’t like putting criminals in prison.

Which is to say that (although they would not admit it) that they don’t particularly mind people (particularly poor people in high crime areas) being victimized by crime.

Which is not to say that Mauer is wrong about giving felons the vote. Our view tends to be “if you let somebody out of prison, and you don’t think they have been punished enough, just keep them another six months or a year, rather than sticking them with lifetime disabilities.”

Good reading in preparation for the politically correct cant that Mauer is likely to produce is our own essay “Does Wisconsin Lock Up Too Many Blacks?” which deals not only with the racial issue, but with the advantages (now unquestioned by economists) of incarceration.

The Real Threat

The “Torture” That Isn’t Torture

From FrontPage Magazine, commentary on the recently released “torture” memos:

[One of the Obama administration’s mistakes] was to endorse the view, promulgated by the Left, that the techniques described in the memos deserve to be called “torture.” Even a cursory examination indicates otherwise. Indeed, so far from being “brutal,” as the New York Times has reported, most of the interrogation techniques are remarkable in their mildness. That is why all of the techniques described in the memos – with the exception of one innovative tactic involving an insect – were also used on some members of the military during their survival (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) training. Far from being licensed to abuse detainees, moreover, CIA interrogators were instructed to make sure that their tactics never caused serious physical or even mental harm – even though their subjects were hardened terrorists avowedly committed to killing as many Americans as possible.

Take the insect “torture.” Specifically designed for al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, a confidant of Osama bin Laden’s with a fear of spiders, it involved placing Zubaydah in a “cramped confinement box” with an ostensibly stinging insect. Except that the insect would actually be harmless caterpillar. No physical harm whatsoever was meant to come to Zubaydah himself and, in any case, the tactic was never used. As evidence of “torture,” this is far from compelling.

One interrogation technique that was used is sleep deprivation. Importantly, however, the memos reveal that the emphasis was always two-fold: to obtain intelligence and cooperation but only insofar as no lasting physical or mental harm came to the detainee. To that end, they stipulate that if the detainee were to be denied sleep then “personnel with medical training” had to be available to intervene “in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction.”

We really have trouble viewing as “torture” something that Marquette students voluntarily subject themselves to!

Even greater precautions were taken as part of a tactic called “walling.” In this technique, interrogators grab a detainee and slam him into a wall. That may sound brutal in theory, but in practice it was anything but. The wall into which subjects would be slammed, for instance, was to be “a flexible false wall.” In addition, the memos explain that when an individual hits the wall, “the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a c-collar effect to help prevent whiplash.” The effectiveness of walling was not in the physical impact, which was minimal, but rather in the intimidating sound that the detainee would hear upon hitting the (again, fake) wall.

If the intent was truly to “torture” these detainees, it’s hard to see why interrogators repeatedly tried to avoid inflicting serious harm.

This inconsistency may explain the obsessive focus with the most controversial of the interrogation techniques used, waterboarding, which entails placing an individual on an inclined bench, covering his forehead and eyes with cloth, and saturating the cloth with water for up to 40 seconds to simulate drowning. Particular outrage has greeted this week’s revelation that the CIA waterboarded two al-Qaeda operatives – Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – a total of 266 times. By all accounts, waterboarding, which was used on only three detainees, is an intensely unpleasant procedure, and reasonable people can disagree about the legitimacy of its now-suspended use by the United States. But several points are worth bearing in mind.

First, as with other government-approved interrogation tactics, waterboarding was carefully monitored to avoid causing severe physical and mental harm. The procedure was not to last beyond 20 minutes at a time, and medical experts were required to be present throughout. In Zubaydah’s case, special care was taken to prevent physical injury, because at the time of his interrogation the al-Qaeda lieutenant was nursing a wound – sustained while fighting against U.S. troops in Pakistan – that his interrogators did not want to exacerbate.

Second, waterboading seems to have been effective, yielding vital intelligence in the War on Terror. According to ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden, Zubaydah revealed critical intelligence information – such as details that led to the capture of senior al-Qaeda agent Ramzi Binalshibh – only after interrogators began using techniques like waterboarding. The same was true for Khalid Shiekh Mohammed (KSM). A May 30, 2005 memo notes that as a result of interrogation techniques like waterboarding, KSM revealed information that led to the discovery of a terrorist plot to crash a hijacked airliner into a Los Angeles building, the disruption of a 17-member Indonesian terrorist cell, and the capture of an Indonesian terrorist and al-Qaeda liaison known as Hambali, among other successes. More broadly, the memo points out that thanks to enhanced interrogation techniques, “KSM and Zubaydah have been pivotal sources because of their ability and willingness to provide their analysis and speculation about the capabilities, methodologies and mindsets of terrorists” (emphasis added). Not surprisingly, the memo reports that the CIA viewed these techniques as “indispensable” to the task of uncovering “actionable intelligence” on terrorist organizations.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of that last fact. The same documents now being denounced as proof of American “torture” represent the U.S. government and the CIA’s best efforts to prevent the repeat of a devastating attack that killed 3,000 Americans. It’s a shame that the Obama administration has chosen to portray those efforts – undertaken with studied caution and a powerful awareness of the consequences of failure – as a betrayal of American ideals. What these officials have received is political absolution for a crime they did not commit. What they deserve is profound thanks for keeping the country safe.

The simple fact is that the left, which will overlook any gross violation of human rights coming from their own side, has latched onto this issue simply because of their hatred of George Bush. What we have here is not genuine moral revulsion, but rather a pretext to attack a man and an administration against which they harbored an irrational, culturally-based hatred.

Unions Attack Charter Schools

It’s well known that unions have strongly opposed private voucher schools. But they have claimed, at least, to like charter schools.

But in reality they don’t like any kind of school choice. From the Wall Street Journal.

On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.

The author, Jay Greene, then goes on to detail attacks on charter schools and continues.

Unions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. New York already has the “card check” unionization procedure for teachers that replaces secret ballots with public arm-twisting. And the teachers unions appear to have collected enough cards to unionize the teachers at two highly successful charter schools in New York City. If unions force charters to enter into collective bargaining, one can only imagine how those schools will be able to maintain the flexible work rules that allow them to succeed.

The highest quality studies have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools. In New York City, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found that students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and were forced to return to district schools.

Florida State economist Tim Sass and colleagues found that middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than their peers who returned to district high schools because charter high schools were not available.

The most telling study is by Harvard economist Tom Kane about charter schools in Boston. It found that students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit.

When charter schools unionize, they become identical to traditional public schools in performance. Unions may say they support charter schools, but they only support charters after they have stripped them of everything that makes charters different from district schools.

Vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire. But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble. It’s time for reformers to increase pressure on politicians bending to the will of the unions and close the new education gap -- the one between what Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan say about education and what they do.

School choice is the issue that shows how little liberals really care about poor children.

They are “pro-poor” if in involves redistributing income from productive citizens to government. They are “pro-poor” if it involves the proliferation of social programs that employ their friends. They are “pro-poor” if it involves more government control of business.

But if helping poor people involves giving more power to parents, and reducing the power of their allies in the teacher’s union and their allies in the bureaucracy, liberals could care less.

Good For the Snipers

Obama White House Demands Removal of Christian Symbol at Georgetown

From CNS news:

Georgetown University says it covered over the monogram “IHS” — symbolizing the name of Jesus Christ — because it was inscribed on a pediment on the stage where President Obama spoke at the university on Tuesday and the White House had asked Georgetown to cover up all signs and symbols there.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the “IHS” monogram that had previously adorned the stage at Georgetown’s Gaston Hall was still covered up--when the pediment where it had appeared was photographed by CNSNews.com.

President Obama is greeted by Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia as he arrives to deliver remarks on the economy, April 14, 2009, at Georgetown University. Georgetown had covered the symbol “IHS” on the pediment above and behind the two men. “In coordinating the logistical arrangements for yesterday’s event, Georgetown honored the White House staff’s request to cover all of the Georgetown University signage and symbols behind Gaston Hall stage,” Julie Green Bataille, associate vice president for communications at Georgetown, told CNSNews.com.

The letters “IHS” are something most media don’t seem to understand.

In fact, it’s based on a vision supposedly seen by Roman emperor Constantine, with IHS standing for in hoc signo [vinces] -- “in this sign conquer.” The sign being the cross.

Many Christians think it means “in His service.” Either way, it’s most certainly a Christian symbol.

Either way, something that Barack Obama is uncomfortable with.

What is most shocking is that Georgetown would submit to a demand like this, agreeing — for publicity or favor with liberals — to conceal a symbol of its own identity.

Politically Correct Sportsware at Marquette

From the Journal-Sentinel:

Marquette University has severed ties with Russell Athletic, making it the latest in a string of universities to end its contract with the manufacturer after the firm may have suppressed an effort by factory workers in Honduras to unionize.

United Students Against Sweatshops, a national network of student organizers, posted an item on Twitter saying that Marquette is the 28th university to cut ties with the Atlanta-based clothing maker. The group estimates on its web site that its campaign against Russell has resulted in this company losing more than $5 million in collegiate business.

Marquette directed the Collegiate Licensing Company, a licensing agency that works with more than 200 universities, to terminate Russell’s Marquette licensing agreement in February of this year, university spokeswoman Brigid Miller said.

Miller said Marquette doesn’t disclose its reasons for taking contractual action with parties.

A commenter responding to this article presented the other side.

I work with Russell, and I’d like to respond to the false accusation that we closed this plant because it was unionized. We had already recognized this plant’s union status for more than a year before announcing the closure. The Fair Labor Association, as well as an independent report it commissioned both agreed: it was necessary for us to close one of our three plants in Honduras because of the global economic slowdown. The independent report also confirmed the two reasons why we chose this plant in particular: 1) The need for products sewn there was lower than any of our other factories in Honduras. And 2) it was the only one with a lease we could vacate immediately, which saved us $2 million. No one has ever refuted any of these economic factors.

Once people see all the facts in this case, they come to a different conclusion. Princeton University, for example, recently decided to continue its merchandising relationship with Russell Athletic. In an article in the Daily Princetonian, Princeton Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee said the University relies on the FLA for monitoring, and he was not convinced that anti-union sentiment motivated the closure of Russell’s Honduras plant. “The decision to close this factory was driven by economic conditions,” he said.

Russell had recognized the union at that plant on October 3, 2007, months before the global slowdown began. A separate report commissioned by the FLA found that management and the union actually had a “cooperative rapport.”

All told the recession has forced several companies to close 25 plants in Honduras. We’ve closed nine plants in Central America because of the economic slowdown, and this was the only one that was unionized. As the FLA noted in its report: “If the primary motive of the company had been to frustrate the union, it could have closed JDH earlier and even switched production from Honduras to Mexico.”

An AP article, cited in the Journal-Sentinel story, gives more information.

It appears that managers at the plant did fire 145 pro-union activist workers, an action the company says was a “mistake.” No Russell Athletic spokesperson was immediately available to comment.

This whole issue reeks of the same kind of self-righteous priggishness as the whole “fair trade” movement. At a time when U.S. automakers are trying (at massive taxpayer expense) to recover from the damage that unions have done to the industry, college activists are trying to impose the same sort of thing on poor third-world countries that badly need jobs.

We are talking here about the same sort of people who oppose NAFTA and CAFTA and free trade generally. Yet free trade will do vastly more to help poor people in the third world than all the smug latte-sipping liberal yuppies (and future yuppies in the Marquette student body) in the world.

However, it’s not just misguided idealism. The activists know that a strong union movement has the effect of taxing workers and using the money to promote a broad leftist political agenda that many (and often most) of the workers disagree with. But the workers, if the activists have their way, have no choice.

But interestingly, there has been little if any student activism at Marquette on this issue. It appears, at the moment, that politically correct administrators took the initiative. Marquette has sided with the (apparently) 27 other schools who have joined the boycott, and not the hundreds of institutions that have not.

Archbishop Dolan in New York

Milwaukee’s former Archbishop is making rather a splash in the Big Apple.

Check out the coverage of the NBC local affiliate.

Tax It All

Free Speech Under Attack in the “Free World”

From the Washington Post, an article about the increasing tide of censorship in what have traditionally been known as “free” countries.

Among the new blasphemers is legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted last June of “inciting religious hatred” for a letter she wrote in 2006 to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals. Other Western countries, including Canada and Britain, are also cracking down on religious critics.

Emblematic of the assault is the effort to pass an international ban on religious defamation supported by United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. Brockmann is a suspended Roman Catholic priest who served as Nicaragua’s foreign minister in the 1980s under the Sandinista regime, the socialist government that had a penchant for crushing civil liberties before it was tossed out of power in 1990. Since then, Brockmann has literally embraced such free-speech-loving figures as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he wrapped in a bear hug at the U.N. last year.

The U.N. resolution, which has been introduced for the past couple of years, is backed by countries such as Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive nations when it comes to the free exercise of religion. Blasphemers there are frequently executed. Most recently, the government arrested author Hamoud Bin Saleh simply for writing about his conversion to Christianity.

While it hasn’t gone so far as to support the U.N. resolution, the West is prosecuting “religious hatred” cases under anti-discrimination and hate-crime laws. British citizens can be arrested and prosecuted under the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which makes it a crime to “abuse” religion. In 2008, a 15-year-old boy was arrested for holding up a sign reading “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult” outside the organization’s London headquarters. Earlier this year, the British police issued a public warning that insulting Scientology would now be treated as a crime.

No question, the subjects of such prosecutions are often anti-religious -- especially anti-Muslim -- and intolerant. Consider far-right Austrian legislator Susanne Winter. She recently denounced Mohammad as a pedophile for his marriage to 6-year-old Aisha, which was consummated when she was 9. Winter also suggested that Muslim men should commit bestiality rather than have sex with children. Under an Austrian law criminalizing “degradation of religious doctrines,” the 51-year-old politician was sentenced in January to a fine of 24,000 euros ($31,000) and a three-month suspended prison term.

But it is the speech, not the speaker, that’s at issue. As insulting and misinformed as views like Winter’s may be, free speech is not limited to non-offensive subjects. The purpose of free speech is to be able to challenge widely held views.

Yet there is a stream of cases similar to Winter’s coming out of various countries:

In May 2008, Dutch prosecutors arrested cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot for insulting Christians and Muslims with a cartoon that caricatured a Christian fundamentalist and a Muslim fundamentalist as zombies who meet at an anti-gay rally and want to marry.

Last September, Italian prosecutors launched an investigation of comedian Sabina Guzzanti for joking about Pope Benedict VXI. “In 20 years, [he] will be dead and will end up in hell, tormented by queer demons, and very active ones,” she said at a rally.

We rather welcome the punishment of anti-Christian speech, and not because we favor censorship, but rather because free speech has to be viewed as a prisoners’ dilemma what has iterated to a cooperative solution.

The logic is simple: if conservative Christians have the power to shut up secular leftists, and secular leftists have the power to shut up conservative Christians, then each side will come to accept that tolerating the other side is the price of its own free speech.

But where one side can shut up the other with impunity, it has no incentive to be tolerant. This is usually the case in academia, and in places like Canada.

In February, Rowan Laxton, an aide to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, was arrested for “inciting religious hatred” when, watching news reports of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza while exercising at his gym, he allegedly shouted obscenities about Israelis and Jews at the television.

Also in February, Britain barred controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders from entry because of his film “Fitna,” which describes the Koran as a “fascist” book and Islam as a violent religion. Wilders was declared a “threat to public policy, public security or public health.”

And in India, authorities arrested the editor and publisher of the newspaper the Statesman for running an article by British journalist Johann Hari in which he wrote, “I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a ‘Prophet’ who at the age of 53 had sex with a 9-year-old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.” In India, it is a crime to “outrage religious feelings.”

History has shown that once governments begin to police speech, they find ever more of it to combat. Countries such as Canada, England and France have prosecuted speakers and journalists for criticizing homosexuals and other groups. It’s the ultimate irony: free speech curtailed for the sake of a pluralistic society.

Still Another Case of Pro-Gay Fascism in Academia

From the Ann Arbor News:

A national public interest group has filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University on behalf of a graduate student who allegedly was dismissed from counseling studies for her religious beliefs regarding homosexuality.

The suit was filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Detroit by the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom, a conservative public interest group focusing on religious freedom.

It alleges that EMU violated the civil rights of Julea Ward, a graduate student in school counseling, by dismissing her from the program because she would not affirm homosexual behavior in the context of counseling, as specified in university policy.

EMU’s handbook for students in the counseling program sets out that they adhere to American Counseling Association standards, which require counselors to not engage in discrimination based on, among other things, sexual orientation.

When Ward was asked to counsel a client wishing to discuss a homosexual relationship, Ward objected and followed her supervisor’s instructions by referring the client to another counselor, said Jeremy Tedesco, an Arizona-based attorney working on the case.

Although she had been instructed to refer clients when faced with an ethical dilemma, Ward was still brought up on disciplinary charges, Tedesco said. Dismissal proceedings began in January, and in March she was dismissed from the counseling program. She lost an appeal to the dean of the school of education.

Pam Young, an EMU spokeswoman, released a statement that said the university doesn’t comment about pending litigation, but that EMU is “a diverse campus with a strong commitment not to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.”

Interesting statement. What it actually means, in the context of academia, is that we won’t discriminate against homosexuals, but we will certainly discriminate against Christians.

The lawsuit says that Ward is “a Christian who derives her beliefs and moral values from the Bible.”

“Based on her sincerely held religious beliefs, Ms. Ward believes that homosexual behavior is immoral sexual conduct, and cannot affirm or validate that behavior or otherwise use her counseling skills and abilities to facilitate homosexual behavior, without violating her sincere religious beliefs,” the suit states.

Tedesco said Ward’s dismissal stemmed from an incident in a practicum course, in which students counsel clients under the supervision of EMU faculty. Faced with counseling a client involved in a homosexual relationship, Ward approached her faculty supervisor prior to meeting to ask for advice.

The supervisor, identified as professor Yvonne Callaway, advised Ward to refer the client to another counselor, according to the lawsuit. Shortly after, Callaway initiated disciplinary proceedings against Ward.

Of course, a liberal social worker would never be required to condone behaviors she believed to be (say) racist or sexist. We can’t imagine that a feminist social worker would be required to counsel a Muslim woman in a way that condoned fundamentalist Islamic views about relations between the sexes. And we can’t imagine that any social worker would be required to condone sexually molesting children.

But a different standard applies to Christians.

But if the above isn’t chilling enough, it goes further.

Ward then underwent an informal review during which she was asked to undergo a remediation program to change her beliefs relating to counseling about homosexuality, the suit states. When Ward refused, she went through a formal review process with counseling professors. A transcript of the review, filed with the complaint, quotes Callaway as saying the client’s referral was a violation of ethical codes.

According to the transcript, Callaway said Ward questioned the ACA’s authority to regulate her behavior and that Ward said she refused to compromise her religious beliefs.

Ward received a letter March 12 informing her of her dismissal from the program.

In other words, she was offered to opportunity to submit to brainwashing to escape punishment.

On March 29, College of Education Dean Vernon C. Polite upheld the dismissal.

“In essence, what the university wants (Ward) to do is affirm homosexual behavior within the context of a counseling relationship in order to get a degree there,” Tedesco said. “That’s something she’s unwilling to do.”

The lawsuit is seeking Ward’s reinstatement into the counseling program and includes a claim for compensatory damages as determined in court. Tedesco said Ward’s attorneys will file a preliminary injunction seeking her reinstatement shortly. Ward was four requirements away from graduating with a master’s degree and has a 3.91 GPA, the suit says.

Allowing a counselor with moral objections to homosexuality to simply hand off a client to a secular liberal colleague would seem to be a reasonable accommodation to sincere religious beliefs.

But the gay lobby (and its politically correct academic acolytes) are not about tolerance. They are about orthodoxy. Everybody must think the way they want them to think — or at least be forced to pretend that they think that way — or they will be punished.

George Orwell and the United Nations

From Heart, Mind & Strength blog, a bit of bureaucratic prose from the International Conference on Population Program of Action and Development (ICPD), and a translation into honest language.

(U.N. documents are never actually written in honest language.) First, from the bureaucrats:

We must, as well, foster equal partnerships and sharing of responsibilities in all areas of family life, including in sexual and reproductive life, and promote frank discourse on sexuality, including in relation to sexual health and reproduction. We must also acknowledge the direct link between population rates, fertility, and the ability to reach development outcomes.

Now, the translation:

We must be sure to further marginalize and stigmatize women who choose to become mothers, or who once becoming them, embrace this role, and desire to devote themselves to it full-time, and not necessarily earn an income while doing so. We must ensure that all women are forced from their homes, and their small children as early as possible - including breastfeeding mothers - so that they will earn at least 50% of the family income for political reasons and not for any reason based on the good of the woman, the good of the child, or the good of society. We must ensure that no one sees any good coming out of motherhood, and stamp out anyone who in the free exercise of their personal liberty might choose to believe that babies need their mothers and mothers need their babies (much less that both mothers and fathers have a unique and important role to play in the development of a young child - only fatherhood is more to be despised than motherhood). Believing in the goodness of motherhood - especially the desire to mother more than 1.2 children - is politically subversive and adversely affects those women in power who prefer to work outside the home and need all women to make that same choice in order to feel vindicated in it. We are “pro-choice” as long as all women make the choices that we ourselves prefer.

We must assume that women in developing countries desire the same things and have the same values as Western women and prefer to find their value in being economic producers and we must make sure that no woman feels fulfilled or valuable as “just” a mother.

We must remember that children - especially children of color or children in developing countries, who often come to the world in disconcertingly large numbers in our own view - are first and foremost a drain on the environment, and secondarily, a commodity that should be only created in the model ordered by wealthy Westerners, only if “wanted” and only if they can be produced economically, raised in what we regard, without any scientific evidence to support our requirements, in an ecologically-sustainable way, and if their numbers are strictly limited. Otherwise, because all children represent a threat to the adult material lifestyle of Western countries, which is the pinnacle of all good things (we believe), their lives should be seen as generally unimportant and mothers should be further stigmatized because they collaborate in the creation of this threat to our collective lifestyle.

We must ensure the universal adoption of the aforementioned goals and values by promoting at first voluntary, but then increasingly coercive methods of fertility control, combined with high-quality propaganda ensuring that all women see prospective motherhood as an unworthy pursuit and the threat to everyone’s well-being, especially their own, that we, the powers that be, believe it to be.

Mess It Up

James Carville at Marquette

From the organizers of the event:

James Carville
Behind the headlines from Clinton to Obama:
your questions, his perspective.

This event is sponsored by The Les Aspin Center for Government Alumni Council, the MUSG Student Activity Fund, the Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Student Affairs.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
7 p.m.
Monaghan Ballroom
Alumni Memorial Union
Free and open to the public Tickets will be available for students starting March 30 in the AMU’s Brooks Lounge. Pick them up quickly—they will be available to the public starting April.

Carville is hardly the most admirable figure in modern American politics. In fact, he’s a rather sleazy character. But at least an important sleazy character.

Students need to get tickets quickly, before they are given to the general public.