Posted on 07/04/2008 6:29:59 AM PDT by rhema
Pro-life teachers, students and other educators have been protesting this week at the National Education Association annual convention at the Washington Convention Center. The protest, which started on Wednesday, pointed out how the union has upset pro-life advocates many times over the years.
Most recently, the NEA came under fire from pro-life advocates when it hosted a forum featuring a late-term abortion practitioner.
With signs reading "NEA: Be Abortion Neutral” and "Pro-Life NEA Member,” the pro-life advocates say they hope to remove current pro-abortion language from NEA policies such as statements endorsing “family planning” and “reproductive freedom.”
Bob Pawson of Pro-Life Educators and Students initially talked with LifeNews.com about the protest he has coordinated for years at the national event.
Pawson, an NEA-NJEA teacher in Trenton, says the NEA should be one of the leading advocates against abortion because the practice is killing the next generation of students.
"A pro-abortion position isn't just morally outrageous; it's stupid; economic suicide. Twenty-five abortions equal one lost classroom, lost teaching careers, and catastrophic losses to America's future," he said.
Nancy Tanner, a retired teacher and NEA member told CNS News the protest is important to keep the largest teacher’s group aware of the pro-life views of a large number of its members. She said pro-life teachers and educators don’t appreciate the group deviating from its mission of improving education and fighting for better pay and benefits for educators.
"These 3.2 million teachers do not join the NEA to support political candidates and agendas that do not represent them, their morals, values or well being," Tanner said.
"Abortion is not a good thing for women, it is not a good thing for teachers, and it is certainly not a good thing for the children whose lives it takes,” she added.
"Those are personal decisions that people make," she told the conservative news service. "It's not something that 3.2 million members are going to jump behind and endorse. It's just not there. The support is not there within the membership."
The National Education Association came under fire in march for allowing a radical pro-abortion group to use its building to host a forum featuring controversial late-term abortion practitioner George Tiller.
LifeNews.com reported on the NEA-hosted pro-abortion forum and the criticism of it. Later, NEA Assistant General Counsel Michael Simpson slammed the criticism as "untrue and unfair."
That wasn't the first time the NEA has opened its doors for abortion advocates.
The teacher's union allowed its headquarters to become a hospitality center for participants at the pro-abortion march in 2004 in Washington. NEA state affiliates, including its New Jersey group, sponsored buses to bring pro-abortion activists to the march.
Pawson said that and other abortion advocacy doesn't represent America's teachers.
"We teachers love children. Most are pro-life. It's unacceptable for union representatives to condone or promote killing babies, future students, in their mothers' wombs," he said.
ACTION: Send your complaints to the National Education Association. Go to the NEA for contact information.
Since the NEA is, as any union, all about the jobs for members, being pro-abortion is equivalent to the eating of the seed corn by farmers.
As the Guinness Brothers say —— “BRILLIANT!!!”
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Thank you for your efforts on behalf of the unborn.
We Protestants and Catholics need to spend more time fighting abortion and other travesties in our Society rather than fighting each other over Doctrine.
We are all followers of Jesus and there’s more to unite us than there is to divide us.
Please add me to your Pro Life ping list. Thank you.
Please Freepmail me if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.
Why not get their names and congratulate them?
Why not write to the NEA and tell them to support these teachers.
Or is it just easier to sit around fanning yourself with your Ph.D. and make sweeping generalizations about how bad the system is?
what are you talking about?
This is the first I have seen this thread.
By the way I have a doctorate but it is not a Ph.D.
I am talking about the appearance of hypocrisy, You are always among the first to condemn, how about singing the praises of these dedicated teachers and students?
sorry!
I haven’t read the thread yet, and I was pinged for a comment even before I knew the thread existed.
Later ( maybe)
Makes me think I need to check the NEA plans for this weekend, and change mine. Very likely will happen and maybe I'll have something to report back.
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So long as wintertime is extorted to pay the bills of the public schools or whatever most are, she gets to complain. We call it the First Amendment and it guarantees freedom for the speech that offends even tax-pampered gummint employees. In fact, that was probably the founders' exact intention. Give up access to the tax money and you will probably hear less criticism because no one will care during the transition to educational excellence in the private sector.
As I understand it, resistance to lavish or any gummint expenditures on "public" "schools" is quite consistent with conservatism. There are lesser arguments (a need for universal literacy, for example) that can be made for the other side and called somehow "conservative."
JimRob: In case there should be any pressure on management to shut down criticism of government schools as though such criticism might be viewed as personal criticism of teachers who post here, I hope that appropriate distinctions are observed and that open discussion is preserved. Your website, of course, and thus your call as it should be. We are but your guests.
If you do get to that NEA convention, please find any display hall where competing vendors are hawking “curricula”, get samples and tell us what uou find. Likewise, the resolutions considered and enacted by NEA. Good luck and God bless.
I can't understand why there hasn't been a big media splash about the protest.
And while you're at it, maybe you'll find the opportunity to ask an NEA bigwig about political contributions that don't come close to matching the political diversity of their membership:
OpenSecrets.org has chronicled the top 100 political givers from 1989-2008. The top 16 appear below, the two teacher unions being #7 and 16. After the group's name and cumulative dollars donated, the first percentage is donations to Democrats, the second percentage to Republicans.
1 American Fedn of State, County & Municipal Employees $39,392,153 98% 1%
2 AT&T Inc $39,065,076 43% 56%
3 National Assn of Realtors $32,336,506 47% 52%
4 American Assn for Justice $28,727,389 90% 9%
5 Goldman Sachs $28,701,957 62% 36%
6 Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers $27,898,934 97% 2%
7 National Education Assn $27,713,779 93% 6%
8 Laborers Union $26,503,339 91% 7%
9 Service Employees International Union $25,931,093 95% 3%
10 Carpenters & Joiners Union $25,627,582 89% 9%
11 Teamsters Union $24,992,064 92% 7%
12 Communications Workers of America $24,871,179 99% 0%
13 American Medical Assn $24,728,871 38% 61%
14 United Auto Workers $24,343,620 98% 0%
15 Citigroup Inc $24,271,821 49% 50%
16 American Federation of Teachers $24,113,243 98% 0%
For those keeping score of NEA-AFT contributions at home: $49,887,057 to Democrats, $1,662,827 to Republicans.
I would agree that resistance to federal spending on education is consistent with conservatism, since there is nothing in the Constitution about education being a function of the federal government.
However, powers not granted to the federal government are reserved by the states, and my state's constitution says that public education is a primary function of the state government. State spending on education is therefore constitutional in at least some states.
One could argue that given our current world, federal standards for education would improve our national competitiveness, but that is a totally different discussion.
There are lesser arguments (a need for universal literacy, for example) that can be made for the other side and called somehow "conservative."
Yes, Thomas Jefferson himself made the argument that our form of government required an educated citizenry if it were to continue, and he advocated for a public education system for that reason.
I'm guessing that most of us consider Thomas Jefferson's ideas to be quite conservative, although for his time they were extremely liberal. ;-)
My problem with wintertime has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it is abuse of freedom of speech. The founders never intended that freedom to be absolute., ie yelling fire in a crowded theater.
wintertime has established a pattern of:
1) referring to the entire public school system as evil.
2) referring to public school employees as leftists, Marxist, and useful idiots.
She is certainly entitled to hold these views. Since there are a number of us that as public school employees are conservatives, are not Marxists, and have IQ's higher then 90, she is not entitled to use the label of ALL.
By her own admission she refuses to work within the system to make improvements. She has not run for a school board not done anything else to reform the system.
As a matter of fact her action of removing conservatives from the system virtually assures the liberals a louder voice.
Quite frankly some one needs to take her aside and let her know that these fanatical views of hers paint the conservative movement in a bad light and make our work more difficult.
As long as she continues to label us ALL with such a broad sweeping brush I will call her on it.
When I view her posts as abusive I will ask to have them removed and when she is over the top I will ask to have her banned.
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