Liberal “Diversity” at the Huffington Post

Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa

— Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016

Academic Yahoos: A Roundup

From Walter Williams in The Examiner:

Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who are accused of setting the bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon, attended the University of Massachusetts. Maybe they hated our nation before college, but if you want lessons on hating America, college attendance might be a good start. Let’s look at it.

“We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.” That’s taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.

University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow preaches hate to his students in his regulation of elections and political finance class, recently telling them that Republicans are stupid, racist losers and that they are angry old white people. A few years ago, Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, “The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world.” Penn State University professor Matt Jordan compared supporters of the voter ID laws to the Ku Klux Klan. Professor Sharon Sweet, an algebra teacher at Brevard Community College, told her students to sign a pledge that read, “I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.” Fortunately, the college’s trustees fired her.

University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis tweeted, “I want (National Rifle Association executive vice president) Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” He asked, “Can (we) define NRA membership as dues contributing to a terrorist organization?” Here’s a sample of how Professor Loomis frequently expresses himself: “Motherf---ing f---heads f---ing f---.” Then there’s Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, “But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.” Professor Seidman worked for The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. When he was sworn in as an officer of the court, I wonder what constitution he swore to uphold and defend.

Parents don’t have to wait for college admission for their youngsters to receive America-hating lessons. Scott Compton, an English teacher at Chapin High School in Chapin, S.C., was put on administrative leave after he allegedly threw an American flag on the floor and stomped on it in front of his students. He has chosen to resign.

An Advanced Placement world geography teacher at Lumberton High School in Texas encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing and instructed them to refer to the 9/11 hijackers not as terrorists but as “freedom fighters.” They were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as genocide. John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, told Fox News that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.

In McAllen, Texas, teachers tried to force a teenager to sing the Mexican national anthem and recite Mexico’s pledge of allegiance. The teen refused, saying it was against her beliefs as an American. She was thrown out of the class and given a failing grade for that day’s assignment. Her father has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter against the McAllen Independent School District.

Investor’s Business Daily ran a story that shows student indoctrination is official union policy: “A New Low From The California Federation Of Teachers: Urine Indoctrination” (12/5/12). The union’s website has a cartoon narrated by leftist Hollywood actor Ed Asner. In tones used when reading to children, Asner says: “(Rich people) love their money more than anything in the whole world. ... Over time, rich people decided they weren’t rich enough, so they came up with ways to get richer.” The cartoon finishes its class warfare message by graphically depicting “the rich” urinating on the poor.

These people running our education system are destroying the minds and values of our young people, and we allow them to do it.

Of course, one could argue that these examples of outrageous indoctrination are atypical, and to an extent they are. But we have blogged about several examples nearly this bad at Marquette. Even an occasional example is an outcropping of a narrow, insular and intolerant culture among academics. When an entire subculture leans left, leftist extremism doesn’t seem that abnormal.

One could also argue that college professors (but not high school teachers) have academic freedom, and can say outrageous things. This, of course, is quite correct. But anybody has an equal right to hold such academics in contempt. Taxpayers have a right to vote against politicians who keep funding public universities at a high level, and parents have a right to look for a college for their kids from among the minority of institutions that actually have a diversity of opinion.

A good place to start is among Christian colleges, and not “Christian” colleges that, like Marquette, are only nominally Christian. There are a few that really are Christian. Those, ironically, would be more congenial to non-believers who are conservative or libertarian than the secular, politically correct places.

Politically Correct Marquette Faculty Rally Behind FemSex

From the Marquette Tribune, an open letter from faculty who support the FemSex workshop, from which Marquette recently pulled support.

The letter engages in the standard blather about how great the workshop was. It further makes a few absurd claims, such as:

By affirming the worth and importance of female desire and fostering people’s understanding and appreciation of their bodies and sexuality, the curriculum also cultivates a campus climate in which the sexual assaults that brought Marquette under public scrutiny two years ago can become less likely.

How this would supposedly happen is a mystery. How writing pornographic stories, or coloring pictures of female genitalia (both part of FemSex at Marquette) might prevent rape is something only a feminist could imagine.

But what is interesting is the list of faculty who signed the letter:

Eugenia Afinoguenova, Lauren Applegate, Tara Baillargeon, Danielle Beverly, Amy Blair, Omega Burckhardt, Gerry Canavan, Roberta Coles, Ed de St. Aubin, Eric Dunnum, Ellen Eckman, Jenn Fishman, Leah Flack, Kristen Foster, Stephen Franzoi, Melissa Ganz, Barbara Glore, Beth Godbee, John Grych, Angelique Harris, Steven Hartman-Keiser, Heather Hathaway, Heather Hlavka, Jim Holstein, CJ Hribal, Andrew Kahrl, Astrida Kaugars, Laurieann Klockow, Lezlie Knox, Christine Krueger, Robert Lowe, Timothy McMahon, Jodi Melamed, Dawne Moon, Sameena Mulla, Kristy Nielson, Rebecca Nowacek, Debra Oswald, Tony Peressini, Anthony Porcelli, Sareene Proodian, Krista Ratcliffe, Heidi Schweizer, Mary Anne Siderits, Angela Sorby, James South, Peter Staudenmaier, Meghan Stroshine, Theresa Tobin, Robert Topp, Sarah Wadsworth, Elizabeth Wawrzyniak, Amelia Zurcher

This is pretty much a Who’s Who of the politically correct secular caucus on campus, full of the names of the people who wanted to hire aggressively lesbian dean candidate Jodi O’Brien. Among the signers is a psychology professor who demeaned the Bible as “sexist” by ripping a passage out of context.

Then there is a philosophy professor whose class was approvingly described by a student acolyte:

I just finished up an entire class on how patriarchy controls every structure in our society and how women are systematically prevented from being equal to men (Capitalism and Catholicism are among the most guilty parties).

Then there is James South who, as chair of the Philosophy Department tore down from the door of a graduate student a quote from humorist Dave Barry of which he disapproved!

This, in other words, is part of the “we don’t really like Catholicism, and want to undermine it when we can” lobby at Marquette.

Are the Democrats Pro-Choice?

Conservative Catholicism: The Future of the Church

From the Wall Street Journal:

In his Holy Thursday homily at St. Peter’s Basilica on April 5, Pope Benedict XVI denounced calls from some Catholics for optional celibacy among priests and for women’s ordination. The pope said that “true renewal” comes only through the “joy of faith” and “radicalism of obedience.”

And renewal is coming. After the 2002 scandal about sexual abuse by clergy, progressive Catholics were predicting the end of the celibate male priesthood in books like “Full Pews and Empty Altars” and “The Death of Priesthood.” Yet today the number of priestly ordinations is steadily increasing.

A new seminary is to be built near Charlotte, N.C., and the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has expanded its facilities to accommodate the surge in priestly candidates. Boston’s Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley recently told the National Catholic Register that when he arrived in 2003 to lead that archdiocese he was advised to close the seminary. Now there are 70 men in Boston studying to be priests, and the seminary has had to turn away candidates for lack of space.

According to the Vatican’s Central Office of Church Statistics, there were more than 5,000 more Catholic priests world-wide in 2009 than there were in 1999. This is welcome news for a growing Catholic population that has suffered through a real shortage of priests.

The situation in the U.S. is still tenuous. The number of American Catholics has grown to 77.7 million, up from 50 million in 1980. But the priest-to-parishioner ratio has changed for the worse. In 1965, there was one priest for every 780 American parishioners. By 1985, there was one priest for every 900 Catholics, and by 2011 there was one for every 2,000. In dioceses where there are few ordinations, such as New York’s Rochester and Albany, people know this shortage well.

Still, the future is encouraging. There were 467 new priestly ordinations in the U.S. last year, according to a survey by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, up from 442 a decade ago.

While some of the highest numbers of new priests are in the Catholic-majority cities of Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia, ordinations in Washington, D.C. (18 last year) and Chicago (26) also are booming. The biggest gains are not only in traditional Catholic strongholds. In Lincoln, Neb., Catholics constitute only 16% of the population yet have some of the strongest numbers of ordinations. In 2011, there were 10 men ordained as priests in Lincoln.

What explains the trend? Nearly 20 years ago, Archbishop Elden Curtiss, then leader of the Omaha, Neb., diocese, suggested that when dioceses are unambiguous and allow a minimum of dissent about the male, celibate priesthood, more candidates answer the call to the priesthood. Our preliminary research on the correlates of priestly ordinations reveals that the dioceses with the largest numbers of new priests are led by courageous bishops with faithful and inspirational vocations offices.

Leadership and adherence to church doctrine certainly distinguish the bishop of Lincoln, the Most Rev. Fabian Bruskewitz. He made national news in 1996 when he stated that members of dissident Catholic groups including Call to Action and Catholics for Choice had automatically excommunicated themselves from the church.

Cardinal Francis George, the longtime leader of the Chicago archdiocese, once gave a homily that startled the faithful by pronouncing liberal Catholicism “an exhausted project . . . parasitical on a substance that no longer exists.” Declaring that Catholics are at a “turning point” in the life of the church in this country, the cardinal concluded that the bishops must stand as a “reality check for the apostolic faith.”

Such forthright defense of the faith and doctrine stands in clear contrast to the emphasis of an earlier generation of Catholic theologians and historians. Many boomer priests and scholars were shaped by what they believed was an “unfulfilled promise” of Vatican II to embrace modernity. Claiming that the only salvation for the church would be to ordain women, remove the celibacy requirement and empower the laity, theologians such as Paul Lakeland, a Fairfield University professor and former Jesuit priest, have demanded that much of the teaching authority of the bishops and priests be transferred to the laity.

This aging generation of progressives continues to lobby church leaders to change Catholic teachings on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and women’s ordination. But it is being replaced by younger men and women who are attracted to the church because of the very timelessness of its teachings.

They are attracted to the philosophy, the art, the literature and the theology that make Catholicism countercultural. They are drawn to the beauty of the liturgy and the church’s commitment to the dignity of the individual. They want to be contributors to that commitment—alongside faithful and courageous bishops who ask them to make sacrifices. It is time for Catholics to celebrate their arrival.

Of course, the same thing is happening within Protestantism. Liberal denominations that spend their time accepting gay marriage, criticizing politicians like Paul Ryan and divesting themselves of stock in companies that do business with Israel are declining. More conservative denominations (and liberal denominations in the Global South -- Methodists and Anglicans in Africa, for example) are at least holding their own, and often prospering.

None of this, of course, proves that liberals in the Church are wrong on theology. But it does prove that their liberal views simply aren’t consistent with a growing, thriving Church.