Posted on 02/13/2004 1:37:38 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
Many University of Nebraska-Lincoln English students got a break from Shakespeare, Faulkner and Sandoz Thursday.
Instead, they filed in and out of the day's special classroom, Andrews Hall's second-floor library, which was festooned with rainbow-colored streamers and a gay pride flag.
Their instructors included the Nebraska American Civil Liberties Union, a campus gay-rights group and various UNLprofessors.
The assignment was simple:Think about gay rights on UNL's campus.
The GLBT Teach-In is designed to educate students and professors about hate crime legislation, same-sex marriage, gay adoption and discrimination by sexual orientation, said Joy Arbor, an English teaching assistant and Teach-In organizer.
Mostly, Arbor hopes the two-day event will get the campus thinking about why these things matter at UNL. The Teach-In started Thursday morning and ends today at 3 p.m.
It got Josh Call thinking Thursday.
"This kind of discussion is so necessary," said Call, an English graduate student, after attending an afternoon lecture. "It's fantastic that these topics are being discussed."
English Department faculty organized the event in response to vandalism of the department's GLBT bulletin board in early January. An unknown person tore the board to shreds during the university's holiday break. It marked the fourth time the board has been vandalized in the past year.
Many English professors required their students attend the Teach-In during their regular class period.
"Some people are looking at this as a celebration in light of obvious discrimination," Arbor said. "Others see it more as an education for all of us."
The celebration, or the education, continued in half-hour speeches through Thursday afternoon.
David Moshman, coordinator for the Academic Freedom Coalition of Nebraska, said both gay-rights advocates and conservative Christians should be able to express their viewpoints during class discussions.
He cautioned professors against stifling students' opinions about sexual orientation, even opinions they themselves disagree with.
"Our basic assumption is that sex is not special," said the UNLeducational psychology professor. "It should be a topic just like any other. The same principles of academic freedom should apply."
Robert Brown, a retired professor who headed a GLBT campus climate survey in 2002, presented the survey's results and outlined some recommendations for improving the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students.
He said the university should recruit gay and lesbian professors to campus.
"The student-athletes have coaches and senior players to help them,"Brown said. "The GLBT population needs the same - if we don't make that effort, students have no place to go themselves."
Earlier in the day, Amy Miller, the legal director for ACLUNebraska, discussed the group's legal challenge to the state's Defense of Marriage Act and its hate crime laws.
Rochelle Harris, an English teaching assistant and Teach-In organizer, hopes students listened to Miller and decided to do something about gay rights in Nebraska. Maybe they talked to another student, who talked to another.
"It's dominoes, baby."
As a faculty member, and the parent of two UNL students, I am outraged to learn that some English professors required their students to attend a gay and lesbian teach-in in lieu of regular classes. Issues such as same-sex marriage and gay adoption are political issues, and forcing particular political viewpoints down the throats of students who have unwittingly registered for a class in English is a gross abuse of the faculty-student relationship. What is particularly bizarre is the participation of self-styled 'civil-liberties' groups in this travesty; how the ACLU reconciles civil liberties with political indoctrination of this sort I can only guess.
All of us must surely deplore the vandalism of bulletin boards in the English Department. If we object some mode of expression, the only legitimate counter is contrary expression. However, it has not been established that this vandalism is a result of anti-homosexual hostility. In several similar recent cases, ostensibly hateful incidents of this sort were perpetrated by members of the supposed victim group, to try to 'raise consciousness' towards their cause. And clearly, if that is the case, the consciousness raising has been successful; it has delivered to UNL's homosexual activists a captive audience for their particular expansive version of homosexual rights.
I would like to see universities operated more like movie theaters. You encounter such "classes," you walk out and demand that portion of tuition for the day in refund.
They lied. Put them back into the nut houses. They never should have let them out in the first place. They were considered a danger to society then, they are a danger to society now.
| What We Can Do To Help Defeat the "Gay" Agenda |
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| Homosexual Agenda: Categorical Index of Links (Version 1.1) |
Fascism.
And this is in a state which voted 3:1 for the most restrictive Defense of Marriage Act in the nation. A university paid for by the state's taxpayers is being used to push an agenda the vast majority of taxpayers have recently and vehemently rejected.
Forced indoctrination at a public university, outside even of a normal class? Is this legal? It sounds unconstitutional to me.
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