Free Republic

(Disclaimer: The author of this piece is a white, middle class, heterosexual, Christian male. Please disregard all opinions below because PRIVILEGE.) A friend texted me the other day about abortion. Previously, she was very pro-choice. However, after reading up on the horrors of abortion and how women are negatively affected, she realized that she was actually pro-life. She told me she felt convicted in her new belief, but she was afraid to speak out about it because “people are too mean.” She's right. People are mean. If she expressed her opinion publicly, there's no doubt she would be ruthlessly attacked...

The Washington Post has published a guest article by a California teacher arguing that American high school students shouldn’t read Shakespeare because he’s a dead, white man. Dana Dusbiber, who teaches English in Sacramento, says she avoids Hamlet and all the rest because her minority students shouldn’t be expected to study a “a long-dead, British guy” (Dusbiber herself is white). And while Shakespeare is widely regarded as the premier writer of the English language, able to timelessly portray themes central to the human experience, Dusbiber says he only is regarded that way because “some white people” ordained it and he...

A Nobel Prize-winning British scientist says he was forced to resign after sexist comments drew widespread condemnation. Tim Hunt told The Observer newspaper in a story published Sunday that he had been "hung out to dry" after being forced out of an honorary post at University College London and losing his position with the European Research Council science committee. The university and the research council didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The 72-year-old Hunt said he was never given a chance to explain his position. The trouble started when he told the World Conference of Science Journalists in South...

I's hard to think of a more bizarre story, or one more representative of contemporary America, than that of Rachel Dolezal. Dolezal is an academic and activist who represented herself as African American for many years, earning a degree in Africana studies, even ascending to the position of president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP. As police killings show, the African American community needs more change As police killings show, the African American community needs more change Dolezal's parents, however, have recently made matters uncomfortable for her, telling the media that she is in fact Caucasian and showing...

The phrase is just one of many that faculty were advised not to use. A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression. According to the handout, called “Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send,” the statement “assert[s] that race and gender [do] not play a role in life successes” — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions. Other microaggressions listed on the document include...

Kirsten Powers gets it. There is an assault on free speech in this country that is coming from the political left. But the people responsible for it are not liberals. They aren’t worthy of the title of liberal, which presupposes a degree of tolerance for opposing opinions. They are illiberal leftists and they are crushing the free exchange of ideas in this country. To make matters worse, they know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. In other words, they are not ignorant of, or merely indifferent to, constitutional principles. They are at war with them....

Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths. Northwestern “feminist” professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students. Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously, reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species) he was so “scared” and “terrified” of his “liberal” students that he self-censors his comments in class and...

[Snip] One of the best books that cracks the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate experiments in the service of a political ideology.” That’s from “The Rape...

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...