Free Republic

In discussing the scandal engulfing former House speaker Dennis Hastert, who is due in court this week, one thing must be made absolutely clear. What he is alleged to have done to young boys has absolutely nothing to do with being gay or gay rights. * Almost immediately after the news broke of Hastert’s indictment, folks looked to Congress for signs of hypocrisy. Former representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, made an assertion during an appearance on Huffington Post Live last Monday that was flat-out inappropriate. “Dennis Hastert twice as speaker tried to get the house to pass a...

A Boston imam and the aunt of the 26-year-old Roslindale man killed by police and the FBI on Tuesday say he was not a terrorist and blamed his “murder” on the media, an investigation gone awry and the strained relationship between cops and black men. “I ask that God overlook the shortcomings in the people who continue to exist that murdered the young man,” said Imam Abdullah Faaruuq of the Mosque for the Praising of the Lord in Roxbury yesterday. “I know that’s probably not what they intended in their hearts. But this is how they’re trained — to shoot...

A teacher at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., allegedly told his tenth-grade students to find their parents’ sex toys and condoms and take selfies with them for extra credit. A local CBS affiliate reports that two of the students’ mothers, Kimberly Cobene and Evangeline Garcia, had heard about the assignment from a counselor at the school. “It was to go into your parents’ private drawers or whatever to seek out sexual toys or condoms, or anything of that nature and to take a selfie with it,” Cobene said. According to CBS, the school administration has tried to play off...

Modern progressive college students have become so militant they’re frightening their own like-minded professors, according to an account posted by one such professor on the website Vox. The professor, using the pseudonym Edward Schlosser, claims to have taught for nine years and currently works at a midsize state college. Over that time, he says, students have decisively shifted to become so protective of their fragile emotions that defying their sensibilities can be “suicidal” for one’s career. “Things have changed since I started teaching,” Schlosser writes. “The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this,...

--SNIP--As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.” So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.” The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development...

“Liberal Professor: My Liberal Students Terrify Me” — so naturally, he goes to Vox.com, the home of Matt “Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do” Yglesias and Ezra “Not everything the Nazis touched was bad” Klein to spill his worst fears. In response, Ace of Spades writes, if a leftwing professor is feeling terrified by his fellow leftists still in the larva stage, “Then all is right. Terror is virtue, Robspierre said. It is through terror that we compel virtue”: I say it’s sort of worth reading because the writer is such a...

Fifty-five scholars signed a letter released yesterday opposing the College Board’s AP U.S. History Framework. Jane Robbins of American Principles Project and retired AP US History teacher Larry Krieger brought this issue to the public’s attention last year with their op-ed in Heartlander Magazine when the framework was made public in 2014. Defenders of the changes have tried to paint those opposed to the framework as ill-informed and politically partisan or as those who want to censor unflattering history.

A stellar group of American historians and academics released a milestone open letter yesterday in protest of deleterious changes to the advanced placement U.S. history (APUSH) exam. The signatories are bold intellectual bulwarks against increasing progressive attacks in the classroom on America's unique ideals and institutions. Moms and dads in my adopted home state of Colorado have been mocked and demonized for helping to lead the fight against the anti-American changes to APUSH. But if there's any hope at all in salvaging local control over our kids' curriculum, it lies in the willingness of a broad coalition of educators and...

Planned Parenthood is now offering “in home sex ed.” Pretty weird? It is called the Responsible Sex Education Institute and the largest chain of abortion clinics says it, “educates and empowers individuals and communities to make responsible choices regarding their sexuality and sexual health by serving as a source for safe, confidential, unbiased, and accurate information about sex and sexuality.” But, just what are they teaching? Apparently, not abstinence…. Rebecca Engle Planned ParenthoodRebecca Engel, Education Program Manager for the Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ sex-ed program, told Trans* Youth Channel that abstinence education does not work. Planned Parenthood has...

MINNEAPOLIS – A sex education teacher has drawn the ire of parents after taking students on a field trip to an adult novelty store in Minneapolis. Gaia Democratic School director Starri Hedges took about a dozen middle- and high-school-aged students to the Smitten Kitten last week. Hedges told the Star Tribune that she wanted to provide a safe and welcoming environment for students to learn about human sexual behavior.

I have often maintained that threats to freedom of expression in this country come predominantly -- probably exclusively -- from the political left. The censoring of a pro-life student club in a Las Vegas high school is a recent egregious example. Angelique Clark, a sophomore at West Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas, says the Clark County School District denied her application to charter a pro-life club as a chapter of Students for Life of America, the nation's largest youth pro-life organization. The district, according to Clark, said, "It was too controversial, and it would be too exclusive, and...

Levin is not just a person who likes to look at pictures of children having sex; he is a sexual sadist who enjoys at least hearing about pain inflicted upon small defenceless children On Friday, former Ontario deputy minister of education, Ben Levin, was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. In March, Levin pleaded guilty to one count each of possessing child pornography, making child pornography, and counselling the commission of a sexual assault. Four other child porn related charges were withdrawn by the Crown. At the time of his arrest in July 2013, Levin was a world renowned...

Despite the left’s efforts to convince us that Obama’s relationship with William Ayers was irrelevant... the facts that prove otherwise are plenty and can no longer be ignored. To understand the agenda (and lies) at the core of our new national standards, you have to go back to why many on the right were concerned about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers to begin with – their work on education reform. The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a progressive education reform model rooted in the social justice pedagogy of John Dewey and Paulo Freire, was expanded by President Obama and communist...

“Was George Washington any different from Palestinian terrorists trying to protect their country?” “Was Jefferson a hypocrite? Did he really think of a slave as a sub-human while writing the Declaration of Independence?” These questions were written for use in the classroom by Grant Wiggins, a Pearson Education author, partner, and Common Core professional development trainer. In partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, Pearson Education provides lessons, texts, professional development, and other resources to states implementing the Common Core State Standards.

The exposure of one of the biggest scientific frauds in recent memory... (Snip) Over and over again, throughout the scientific community and the media, LaCour’s impossible-seeming results were treated as truth, in part because of the weight Green’s name carried, and in part, frankly, because people — researchers, journalists, activists —wanted to believe them. (snip) ...Broockman was consistently told by friends and advisers to keep quiet about his concerns lest he earn a reputation as a troublemaker, or —  perhaps worse — someone who merely replicates and investigates others’ research rather than plant a flag of his own. (snip) This might...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is spending nearly $2 million to see if courts run by teenagers can be a viable tool to fight school bullying. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) tasked WestEd, a San Francisco-based education research group, late last year to study the effectiveness of “youth courts,” where the roles of judge, jury, defense, and prosecution are filled by students, who can then administer punishment in middle and high schools. “Reports of violence, bullying, and other offenses have resulted in concerns about school safety,” according to the NIJ grant. “Administrators, anxious to restore order, have adopted policies...

A group of students at Los Altos High School want California history textbooks revised, claiming the current textbooks don’t tell the whole story. The students claim the version of American history taught in California classrooms is at best incomplete and at worst biased and inaccurate: failing to adequately cover the experiences, accomplishments and frequent mistreatment of communities of color and women. “There’s definitely value at looking at the good things we have done, there’s definitely value at being proud of those things, and there’s even more value in acknowledging what we haven’t done correctly,” one of the students said. Members...

As a speaker was about to begin her lecture criticizing gay marriage Tuesday on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, about 30 students seated in the front rows stood with signs, turned to face the rest of the audience and let loose.

Watching PBS? Might want to ask the kindergartners to leave the room. In a May 27 piece for tax-funded PBS, NewsHour producer Saskia de Melker argued “The case for starting sex education in kindergarten.” In her piece, she held up the Netherlands as an example for the United States in “sexuality education” – for those as young as 4-years-old to learn “honest conversations about love and relationships.”

A Northwestern University professor was accused of retaliation and investigated after students claimed an article she had written had a “chilling effect” on students’s ability to report sexual misconduct.Writing on Friday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Kipnis describes an academic climate in which professors lay awake at night in fear of losing their careers over a single careless word or missed trigger warning. A new academic culture is rising in which hurt feelings are considered evidence of an attack. This hypersensitivity is being abetted by an expanding process of Title IX charges which allow anyone with an agenda...