Free Republic

MEXICO, N.Y. – Mexico High School quarterback Dante Turo believes it’s God who gives him the strength and abilities to be successful on the football field. The junior team leader often points skyward after big plays as a tribute to the Almighty, and his 73-yard run for a touchdown against Vernon-Verona-Sherrill Oct. 17 was no exception, Syracuse.com reports. The solemn celebration, however, apparently didn’t sit well with one referee, who flagged the teen for unsportsmanlike conduct and assessed a 15-yard penalty that ultimately cost his team the game. “I was just trying to give glory to God,” Turo told the...

Of the nearly $600,000 Cornell’s faculty donated to political candidates or parties in the past four years, over 96 percent has gone to fund Democratic campaigns, while only 15 of the 323 donors gave to conservative causes. The Sun’s analysis of Federal Election Committee data reveals that from 2011 to 2014, Cornell’s faculty donated $573,659 to Democrats, $16,360 to Republicans and $2,950 to Independents. Each of Cornell’s 13 schools — both graduate and undergraduate — slanted heavily to the left. In the College of Arts and Sciences, 99 percent of the $183,644 donated went to liberal campaigns. The law school...

Jackson Hole High principal Scott Crisp blamed the results of a student survey and his concerns that some students may feel excluded if they see an American flag for the administration’s decision to cancel “America Pride Day.”

A gay and lesbian-themed graphic novel on an elite university reading list for some incoming college freshmen is generating pushback among Christian students who feel the material is “pornographic.” “Fun Home,” a best-selling story that features a girl coming out as a lesbian and discovering her father was gay, is among several books selected by Duke University “to give incoming students a shared intellectual experience with other members of their class.” Instead, the racy reading material -- which is recommended, but not required -- seems to have stirred up controversy.

A statue of Jefferson Davis has been removed from its place on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin after a failed appeal by a Confederate heritage group. Crews could be seen Sunday morning removing the statue of the Confederate president from its place near the university's iconic clock tower.

The University of New Hampshire has removed from its website a “bias-free language guide” that warned against using the word “American” because it fails to recognize South America. The guide was developed in 2013 by several advocacy groups whose members are appointed by the university president. It was mentioned in an annual report submitted by at least one of those groups in 2014, but the university said administrators did not know about it until this week, when it was criticized in the media. […] It suggested replacements for common terms, such as “person of material wealth” instead of rich and...

Are the nation’s Ivy League schools giving short shrift to conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices when they confer honorary degrees? A survey by one professor suggests the answer is yes, and that the reason is ideology. Of the 14 honorary degrees bestowed by Ivy League institutions to living justices, 12 went to those on the high court’s left side, said ...legal scholar John McGinnis of Northwestern University School of Law. The two exceptions, from Brown and Yale, went to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate... Ginsburg, perhaps the court’s most liberal justice, is the record holder with honorary degrees from...

A North Carolina elementary school teacher has resigned after his decision to read a gay-themed children’s book to his third-grade class led to controversy in the small town of Efland. Omar Currie said he read his students the book “King and King,” a fairy tale about two princes having a “love” encounter, after he perceived negative gay stereotyping in his class. Currie said that he was inspired to teach the little kids about two men “hooking up” because a boy in his class acted a little feminine. “When I read the story, the reaction of parents didn’t come into my mind,”Currie, 25, said...

The growing movement to find new appellations for buildings, landmarks and even bodies of water named after Confederate leaders has finally expanded to reach Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, a model progressive Democrat and a world-class racist scumbag.

From mandates about what food children can eat to draconian attendance policies, it’s becoming increasingly clear that parental rights do not exist when you send your child to public school, as The Blaze’s Matt Walsh has argued before. But in Seattle, it’s even worse. In at least 13 public schools in the area, where kids are banned from even having soda or candy, middle and high school-aged girls can get a taxpayer-funded IUD without their parents’ consent. CNS News reports: [Long-acting reversible contraceptives] are associated with serious side effects, such as uterine perforation and infection. IUDs, specifically, can also act as abortifacients by...

An Illinois school board reportedly fired the teacher who stepped on an American flag in class on May 15 at a local high school. The Mattoon Journal Gazette reports that the Martinsville school board voted unanimously Thursday to dismiss English teacher Jordan Parmenter, effective immediately. Parmenter, 26, told the paper Sunday he was present in the meeting, where he was addressed by the board and answered questions from all six of the board members. Parmenter didn’t speak further into the matter until he had a chance to speak with a union representative.

Fifty years after the birth of the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, officials across the UC system are encouraging faculty and students to purge mundane, potentially offensive words and phrases from their vocabularies. Administrators want members of campus to avoid the use of racist and sexist statements, though their notions about what kinds of statements qualify are completely bonkers. “America is a melting pot,” “Why are you so quiet?” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” are all phrases that should raise red flags, according to the UC speech police. Requests for...

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...

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...

The Young America’s Foundation has once again compiled an invaluable compendium of this season’s commencement speakers and found, once again, that they overwhelmingly represent one point of view. Moreover, in our review of 127 of the arguably representative speakers they highlight, we note that one-third—41—have discernible political views. By the most expansive definition, one-third of these—10—can be called anything from apolitical to definitively conservative: • Gen. Philip M. Breedlove at the Georgia Institute of Technology, • Former President George W. Bush at Southern Methodist University • Former Secretary of labor , Elaine Chao, retired Admiral Thad Allen, at Georgetown •...

On a recent bright spring morning, students admitted to the Barnard College Class of 2019 gathered on campus. As blue-and-white balloons fluttered in the breeze, the prospective freshmen attended panels and lunched on the lawn, chatting animatedly with current students. There were, of course, young women from a variety of backgrounds, but at least one category wasn’t included: transgender women. Barnard, like other women’s colleges, has traditionally admitted only students born female. But that might be changing. Next week, Barnard’s trustees are expected to vote on an issue that has arrived loudly and emphatically on the front burner for women’s...

According to the Rutgers Daily Targum, freshman Emmet Brennan helped author a bill “…to create black, Latino, Asian, and third-gender mascot friends to accompany the school’s original “Scarlet Knight” mascot adopted in 1955.” “Our mascot does not represent how diverse we are as a school,” decided Brennan after he “…noticed the mascot’s fair skin and blue eyes while working as a press box server during the university’s football games.” Katie Park, writing for the Daily Targum, tells her readers: After taking issue with the mascot’s complexion, Brennan began collaborating with student Mohamed Asker who currently serves as the SA’s student...

Orange County (New Jersey) school board officials voted Wednesday to terminate the employment of a third grade teacher who had her students write "get well" letters to a convicted cop killer. According to NJ.com, Marilyn Zuniga, a third grade teacher at Forest Street Elementary School in Orange, was suspended last month after she had her students write the letters of encouragement to Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is currently serving a life sentence for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Marilyn Zuniga's employment was terminated as part of a larger personnel restructuring agenda. By including Zuniga's termination in a larger...

Students at Bangor Area High School in Pennsylvania were encouraged by the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance to wear rainbow-colored T-shirts on Friday of last week in support of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender issues. Instead, two students wore Chick-fil-A T-shirts. Suspensions followed on Monday. But those who were suspended may surprise you: [The school] suspended a group of students for using Twitter during school hours to call out two students wearing Chick-fil-A shirts during a Gay-Straight Alliance event, parents and students said. The suspended students felt the T-shirts were offensive because of widely publicized comments the fast food company’s president and...

Via Pundit Press: Johns Hopkins University has banned Chick-fil-A from its campus saying that the restaurant is a “microaggression” against its students.In an 18-8 vote, the Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins voted not to “support the proposal of a Chick-fil-A, in a current or future sense, particularly on any location that is central to student life.” After all, how can your campus be a safe place if you allow the presence of restaurant whose CEO doesn’t agree with your stance on gay marriage? And besides, all those Chick-fil-A chicken “strips” “nuggets” and “biscuits” – they could serve as “triggers”...