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Attacking Christian Schools
But they're producing citizens who are compassionate, thoughtful, fair-minded, and principled
The attack on the students of Covington Catholic is just one example of the extent to which the Left is willing to go to stigmatize Christianity and force it out of our history and culture. The most innocent actions of Christians are now thrust into the spotlight and mocked by the media — and one of their favorite targets is mainstream Christian education.
For example, when Vice President Pence’s wife Karen revealed that she’s returning to the classroom to teach in a Christian school, a self-described “exvangelical” named Chris Stroop started a hashtag campaign called #exposechristianschools. Stroop calls Christian schools “bastions of bigotry.”
Not wanting to miss out on the action, New York Times reporter Dan Levin posted this on Twitter: “I’m a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I’d like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life.”
Disgraceful, isn’t it? It’d be hard to imagine a reporter soliciting former public-school students to share stories of sex abuse, violence, bad teachers, peer pressure, suicide, politically biased class assignments, and lack of resources. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey wonders “why an obscure social-media hashtag would be worthy of an in-depth report by a major media outlet, regardless of the topic.”
We know why: Because there’s a widespread assault in this country on Christian values, beliefs, and practices.
Of course, we shouldn’t make broad assumptions about the experiences of students in public schools any more than we should be characterizing Christian schools as cults.
Before the Times piece was published, The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson wrote, “With Democrats in the Senate attacking the Knights of Columbus, the left in Texas attacking Christian businesses, and the left nationally trying to kill religious liberty legislation, it is entirely predictable that the Times would join the fight against Christians in America.”
On the surface, Levin’s piece in the Times seems to be an honest, open attempt to paint an unbiased portrait of the experiences of students who’ve attended Christian schools. His opening explanation merely sets up a few categorical first-hand accounts. But despite a few positive anecdotes to make it seem fair, one can’t help but reach a lukewarm conclusion about Christian schools as institutions that, at best, don’t sufficiently educate kids and, at worst, are perpetuating homophobia, sexism, narrow-minded values, and religious dogma.
It’s no wonder that Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a professor of politics and religions at Northwestern University, said, “There’s a real profound sense among a large part of the Christian population that the rug is being ripped out from under them. They feel their moral certitudes and sense of community are being ridiculed.”
The good news is that Christian schools are becoming more popular, and they’re producing citizens who are compassionate, thoughtful, fair-minded, and principled. They’re also turning out pretty good scholars.
William McGurn writes at the Wall Street Journal, “One of the lesser known things about Catholic schools is that they boast a 99% high-school graduation rate — with 86% going to a four-year college, nearly twice the 44% rate of public schools. Particularly in the inner cities, these schools are a lifeline, not least for the tens of thousands of non-Catholic children of color who without that education might be condemned to lives lived at the margins of the American Dream.”
The appeal of a Christian education isn’t limited to Christian schools. More states are considering offering Bible classes in public schools. In Tennessee, there’s a successful Bible curriculum offered to middle- and high-school students at no cost to taxpayers. Starting in 1922, and affirmed by a church-and-state federal court challenge in 1980, the courses are currently available to 81% of public-school students in grades 6-12 — the largest program of its kind in the nation. Enrollment in the classes increased 9% last year and is projected to increase 12% this year. And based on student testing and surveys, the curriculum is very successful.
Reflecting on the trend in recent years to expand religious education in public schools, The Daily Signal’s Daniel Davis recently wrote about a range of programs designed to offer Christian and Bible history education in Kentucky’s public schools, with six other states considering the same.
Christians should continue celebrating all the good that’s taking place in Christian schools, notwithstanding mainstream media attempts to vilify those educational bastions. The American people need to know the truth, because they’re not ever going to get it from the media. What happened to the kids from Covington Catholic is just the beginning. Until Christians across the country start defending themselves, we can expect one assault after another on our beliefs and values.
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Colorado Dems Push LGBT Sex-Ed Requirements
Indoctrination into leftist sexual ethics will be the only perspective allowed in public schools.
Following hours of heated debate and public testimony, Democrats on a Colorado House committee this week approved HB19-1032, which, if passed by the General Assembly, would require the state’s public school sex-education curriculum to include instructions on LGBT relationships. The legislation not only adds these requirements but, more significantly, it “prohibits instruction from explicitly or implicitly teaching or endorsing religious ideology or sectarian tenets or doctrines, using shame-based or stigmatizing language or instructional tools, employing gender norms or gender stereotypes, or excluding the relational or sexual experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals.” In other words, the bill forbids any instruction on sexuality that doesn’t conform to the Left’s “new morality” dogma.
A number of concerned parents showed up at the committee meeting and voiced their objections. One father of four stated, “If you’re for House Bill 1032, then you’re for exposing nine-year-olds to sexually explicit techniques. We don’t want to expose our children to this kind of forced sexual education.”
Stephanie Curry of Family Policy Alliance noted, “It tells schools you can teach it our way or not teach it at all. I think what is most upsetting is parents do not have a choice.” And that’s precisely the direction that Democrats have been moving — where the state controls what children learn, not their parents. With this type of leftist authoritarianism being wielded over public education, is it any wonder that more parents than ever are either homeschooling or sending their children to private schools?
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Australia: Bettina Arndt on campus
Below are some excepts from a very long and rambling article by a supercilious Leftist writer named Tim Elliott that appeared in the "Sydney Morning Herald". I reproduce the bits about Bettina only -- as they are reasonably factual. Much in the rest of the article is biased to the point of misleading.
Bettina objects to the false and misleading talk about men by feminists. You can imagine how well that goes down among feminist bigots and their male sycophants. Now that there are more female university students and graduates than male, any war for equal treatment of females has long ago been clearly won. All that feminists have left is their hate
Welcome to LibertyFest 2018. Run by the non-profit LibertyWorks, LibertyFest bills itself as a "massive free-thinking conference, bringing in speakers from all over Australia to present and discuss genuinely dangerous and disruptive ideas".
But the event's main drawcard, the marquee attraction, is Bettina Arndt. A former journalist and trained psychologist, the 69-year-old Arndt made her name in the 1980s as one of Australia's first sex therapists. "I was a feminist," she tells me when we meet in the hotel cafe. "I was trying to help women. But men also started to talk to me, firstly about sex and then about other aspects of their lives. So I started to realise that there were many issues where men and boys weren't getting a fair deal."
So she became a feminist apostate, an original "women's libber" turned men's rights advocate. Arndt's latest crusade is against what she calls the "manufactured crisis" around sexual assault at Australian universities. (A report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, released in 2017, found that 1.6 per cent of the 30,000 students surveyed were sexually assaulted in a university setting in 2015-16. Nina Funnell, from the support group End Rape on Campus, describes the problem as "very concerning".)
According to Arndt, the figures have been manipulated by feminist activists in a campaign to demonise men. So in August she embarked on what she called her "Fake Rape Crisis tour", a series of university talks aimed at debunking the "myth" that Australian universities are unsafe for women.
It didn't go well. The first event, at Melbourne's La Trobe University, was cancelled after the administration claimed it wasn't compatible with the university's values. (The university soon backtracked and allowed the talk to go ahead.) The next event, at the University of Sydney, turned ugly when about 40 protesters, led by the students' Wom*n's Collective, attempted to block Arndt and others from entering the venue. There was much pushing and shouting and chanting.
"They had megaphones and were calling me a f...wit," Arndt says. (In the end, police were called to remove the protesters, and the talk proceeded as scheduled.) Arndt wasn't bothered by the abuse, per se, but by the attempt to shut her down. Rather than contest her ideas with ideas of their own, the students wanted to deny her the chance to talk altogether. "The fact this happened at a university," Arndt says, "a supposed bastion of thought-provoking ideas and rigorous inquiry, is just terrible." '
What occurred at the University of Sydney has been cited by the media as an example of "de-platforming". De-platforming is, quite literally, denying someone a platform from which to express their views. High-profile cases tend to be on social media, as in the case of Alex Jones, a hugely popular American radio host and conspiracy theorist, whose sites were blocked, in August, by Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify, for repeated instances of hate speech and bullying. Jones has accused Robert Mueller, former FBI director and Special Counsel for the US Department of Justice, of being a paedophile and threatened to shoot him; Jones has also said that singer Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo) should go to Somalia and "get gang raped", and claimed that former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton ran a satanic child sex ring out of a pizzeria.
De-platforming is nothing new: Holocaust deniers have long been shut out of the conversation, sometimes literally. Author David Irving, who claimed that Nazi gas chambers were a hoax, has been barred from entering Australia multiple times since 1993.
But de-platforming appears to be creeping into other areas. In July last year, the Brisbane Writers Festival disinvited outspoken feminist Germaine Greer, whose most recent book, About Rape, was deemed too hot to handle. During the lead-up to the book's publication, Greer said sentences for rapists were "excessive", and suggested that a more fitting punishment might be 200 hours' community service and perhaps an "r" tattooed on the offender's hand. The festival also "disinvited" former Labor foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr, who was due to discuss his political memoir, Run for Your Life, in which he advocates for lower immigration, and discusses bullying by the pro-Israel lobby.
The festival's acting chief executive, Ann McLean, denied de-platforming anyone, arguing that the Greer controversy might have overshadowed other events. As for Carr, McLean said she was concerned that he could have gone off topic. (In a letter to MUP publisher Louise Adler, later leaked to the press, McLean acknowledged that Carr's talk might clash with "the brand alignment of several sponsors we are securing for the festival".)
The organisers were accused of censorship by everyone from conservative commentator Andrew Bolt to Booker Prize-winning author Richard Flanagan. Greer, meanwhile, called the Brisbane Writers Festival "the dreariest literary festival in the world, with zero hospitality and no fun at all", and described her disinvitation as a "great relief".
Greer's choice of the word "fun" is instructive. As a seasoned intellectual combatant, it's safe to say that her idea of "fun" includes, among other things, the robust and frank discussion of big ideas, like the definition of rape, and the suggestion, as she put it at the Hay Literary Festival in the UK last May, that most rapes "don't involve any injury whatsoever", and are merely "careless and insensitive". To other people, namely those who have been raped, Greer's ideas might not be fun, and may even be deeply offensive. In the past, these two groups might have faced off; these days, however, they refuse to even be in the same room.
De-platforming is like one of those exotic illnesses, such as Ebola or Morgellons, the origins of which no one can agree upon. Some blame the proscriptive effect of political correctness or the drift toward political polarisation, whereby ideological foes move so far apart they are no longer willing to listen to one another, or social media, where unhearing opinions you don't like is as easy as pressing the "block" button. Complacency, even a degree of arrogance, might also play a part.
"Some young people think that certain issues, like racism, sexism and homophobia, have been settled for all time and there's no debate to be had," writer David Marr tells me. "What they don't realise is that the really difficult debates never end."
What almost everyone agrees on is that de-platforming is mainly practised by the left. This has been a boon to the right, which can now plausibly claim to be the real free-speech warriors. As Renee Gorman, a University of Sydney student and national manager for the free-market think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, put it at LibertyFest: "We are the counterculture now."
In early December, Arndt launched her latest book, provocatively titled #MenToo. A collection of her writings from the past 30 years, the book essentially restates her thesis that feminism has "gone off the rails", morphing from an equal-rights movement into "a long crusade to crush male sexuality". She spruiked the book on morning TV, and spoke at Parliament House in Canberra. She even met Tehan, to discuss a suggestion by Tanya Plibersek, the Deputy Opposition Leader and shadow federal minister for education and training, to set up an independent taskforce to investigate rape on campus.
Arndt also mentioned doing events with Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right provocateur and internet troll who has, among other things, mocked victims of child sexual abuse, and allegedly encouraged his followers to bombard black actress Leslie Jones with racist tweets, including sexually explicit memes and pictures of apes. (In 2016, Twitter found he had breached its conditions of use and permanently banned him.)
Arndt tells me she doesn't agree with everything Yiannopoulos says. "But he's done great work in calling out the free-speech problem on campus. And he's funny." The prospect, however speculative, of a campus event with Yiannopoulos fills Arndt with an almost palpable excitement. Doubtless the protests would be noisy, widely publicised and great for publicity for her book.
Meanwhile, Arndt keeps fighting the good fight, beavering away, challenging the "fake rapes" and the "victimisation of our young boys on campus". When I speak to her on the phone, just before Christmas, she seems supercharged with a sense of mission, ever vigilant for "all the lies and the rubbish and the propaganda". After all, she adds, "That's what keeps me in business."
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