A Wisconsin school district is under fire after reportedly responding harshly to an op-ed written by a 15-year-old high school student. The anti-gay adoption article, penned by Brandon Wegner, a Christian, ignited intense debate in the district. According to lawyers defending Wegner, he was “censored” and “punished” by school officials following the publication of his article. Some people in the district, though, claim the article, itself, constituted “bullying.” The contentious piece was written for “The Hawk’s Post,” a student-led newspaper. In it, Wegner highlighted his Christian worldview on marriage and adoption, expressing his view that children are best off being raised in families with a mother and father. A portion of the article (read a PDF version here ) reads : “If one is a practicing Christian, Jesus states in the Bible that homosexuality is (a) detestable act and sin which makes adopting wrong for homosexuals because you would be raising the child in a sin-filled environment. A child adopted into homosexuality will get confused because everyone else will have two different-gendered parents that can give them the correct amount of motherly nurturing and fatherly structure. In a Christian society, allowing homosexual couples to adopt is an abomination.” The Christian Post reports about the situation: He cited various authorities and sources, including Scripture, in defense of his opinions. Wegner argued that children raised in an environment in which the mother and father are present had the best chance for success and that homosexual adoption should be prohibited. His article was released in conjunction with an opposing viewpoint provided by another student, Maddie Marquardt, also “The Hawk’s Post” copy editor. Marquardt countered in her argument that gay couples should be able to adopt because the foster system is broken and children need a two-parent home. Also, it should be noted that controversial bible verses — most notably Leviticus 20:13 — were included in the article. It reads , “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” It was his rejection of same-sex adoption and the inclusion of controversial verses that led a Nick Uttecht, a gay parent, to file a complaint with the district. Uttecht claimed that the expressed views in the article “constituted as hate speech” and could potentially “cause kids to commit suicide.” The complaint sparked quite a response from officials. What happened next, critics say, was unfair treatment of Wegner by Shawano School District officials. Following the complaint, the district released a formal statement apologizing for the publication of the column. “We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended and are taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future,” CP quotes the statement as reading. In addition to the statement, the school’s principal allegedly told Wegner, “in a public school, you can’t use the Bible as a source because we can’t impose our religious beliefs on other people.” He purportedly also said: “…the school newspaper is not the place to be talking about your religious beliefs at your age…because of this article you can’t write about religion, politics, or social issues in the school paper.” Liberty Counsel, a non-profit, Christian law firm decided to take up Wegner’s case, calling the district’s treatment of him “shocking” and “outrageous” (they also dubbed it a form of bullying). On the group’s site, the following is written about how the group responded to the situation: Liberty Counsel sent a letter to school officials at Shawano High School after they censored and punished Brandon Wegner, a 15-year-old, for writing an op-ed article explaining the Biblical view of homosexuality and supporting natural mother-father adoption. The letter demands that the school apologize for its unconstitutional and irrational censorship and humiliation of Brandon. The First Amendment protects the opinions of all, including student journalists. The bullying at Shawano High School is by Superintendent Todd Carlson and the school officials, not the student, Brandon Wegner. The school officials have displayed blatant intolerance of a view on homosexuality held by many people. The school’s actions are shocking and unjustified. The superintendent should immediately apologize and stop the bullying. Clearly, this is a battle over values, with both sides maintaining that the other has violated moral and ethical guidelines. Whether the district will, indeed, apologize is yet to be seen, but it’s unlikely this issue will simmer unless individuals from both sides strike some sort of agreement. Legal action may be on the horizon. (H/T: Christian Post )
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Christian Teen Allegedly ‘Censored’ & ‘Punished’ Over Anti-Gay Adoption Newspaper Op-Ed
“Yes We Can,” a slogan popularized by President Barack Obama ‘s 2008 election campaign and Kohl’s Department Store , was almost used in Mitt Romney ‘s own ’08 presidential bid. The detail is included in the new book “The Real Mitt Romney”: One of the campaign’s chief concerns was that Romney would be tagged, as one slide put it, as “Flip-flop Mitt,” given his changes on issues such as abortion. The media team urged Romney to counter that with a forward-looking brand. One of the slides suggested that Romney use this as his catchphrase: ‘Yes, we can.’ But Barack Obama would take it before Romney could. The book is set to be published Jan. 17. h/t Huffington Post
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Romney camp considered ‘Yes We Can’ in 2008
SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. (The Blaze/AP) — For most of her 100 years, Minka Disbrow tried to find out what became of the precious baby girl she gave up for adoption after being raped as a teen. She hoped, but never imagined, she’d see her Betty Jane again. The cruel act of violence bore in Disbrow an enduring love for the child. She kept a black and white photograph of the baby bundled in blankets and tucked inside a basket. It was the last she saw of the girl – until the phone rang in her California apartment in 2006 with the voice of an Alabama man and a story she could have only dreamed. Disbrow, the daughter of Dutch immigrants, weathered a harsh childhood milking cows on South Dakota dairy farms. Her stepfather thought high school was for city kids who had nothing else to do. She finished eighth grade in a country schoolhouse with just one teacher and worked long hours at the dairy. On a summer day in 1928 while picnicking with girls from a sewing class, Disbrow and her friend Elizabeth were jumped by three men as they went for a walk in their long dresses. Both were raped. “We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know what to say. So when we went back, nothing was said,” Disbrow recalled. Months passed. Her body began to change. Disbrow, who had been told babies were brought by storks, didn’t know what was happening. Her mother and stepfather sent her to a Lutheran home for pregnant girls. At 17, she gave birth to a blond-haired baby with a deep dimple in her chin and named her Betty Jane. In her heart, Disbrow longed to keep her. But her head and her mother told her she couldn’t bring an infant back to the farm. A pastor and his wife were looking to adopt a child. She hoped they could give Betty Jane the home she couldn’t. “I loved that baby so much. I wanted what was best,” Disbrow said. She never met them, or knew their names. But over the years, Disbrow wrote dozens of letters to the adoption agency to find out how her daughter was faring. The agency replied faithfully with updates until there was a change in management, and they eventually lost touch. Disbrow’s life went on. She married a fruit salesman who became a wartime pilot and drafting engineer and they had two children. She worked as a dressmaker, silk saleswoman and school cafeteria manager in cities spanning from Rhode Island to Minnesota and Northern California before moving to the seaside town of San Clemente an hour’s drive north of San Diego. Every year, she thought about Betty Jane on her May 22 birthday. Five years ago, Disbrow prayed she might get the chance to see her. “Lord, if you would just let me see her,” Disbrow remembers praying. “I promise you I will never bother her.” On July 2, the phone rang. It was a man from Alabama. He started asking Disbrow, then 94, about her background. Worried about identity theft, Disbrow cut him off, and peppered him with questions. Then, the man asked if she’d like to speak with Betty Jane. Her name was now Ruth Lee. She had been raised by a Norwegian pastor and his wife and had gone on to marry and have six children including the Alabama man, a teacher and astronaut Mark Lee, a veteran of four space flights who has circled the world 517 times. She worked for nearly 20 years at Walmart – and especially enjoyed tending to the garden area. Lee knew she was adopted her whole life, and grew up a happy child. It wasn’t until she was in her 70s that the search for her biological parents began. Lee started suffering from heart problems and doctors asked about the family’s medical history. She knew nothing about it. Her son, Brian, decided to try to find out more and petitioned the court in South Dakota for his mother’s adoption records. He got a stack of more than 270 pages including a written account of the assault and handwritten letters from a young Disbrow, asking about the tiny baby she had cradled for a month. He then went online to try to find one of Disbrow’s relatives – possibly through an obituary. “I was looking for somebody I thought was probably not living,” said Lee’s now-54-year-old son. He typed Disbrow’s name into a web directory and was shocked when a phone listing popped up. “I kind of stopped breathing for a second.” On the phone with her biological daughter, Disbrow was in disbelief. Her legs began to tremble. She couldn’t understand how a naive dairy farm girl without an education could have such accomplished grandchildren. A month later, Ruth Lee and Brian Lee flew to California. They arrived at Disbrow’s meticulous apartment on a palm tree-lined street armed with a gigantic bouquet of flowers. Disbrow couldn’t get over how Lee’s hands were like her mother’s. Lee was amazed at the women’s similar taste in clothing. They pored over family photo albums and caught up on the years Disbrow had missed. “It was just like we had never parted,” Disbrow said. “Like you were with the family all your life.” Since then, the families have met numerous times. Disbrow has gone to visit grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Wisconsin and Texas. She is planning to travel to Alabama in the spring, where they will celebrate her recently marked 100th birthday. Disbrow has started sharing her story with members of her church and community. The Orange County Register ran a story about Disbrow’s journey in December. The family’s improbable reunion also made the local newspaper in Viroqua, Lee’s hometown in western Wisconsin. “It has been such a surreal, amazing experience that I still think sometimes that I will wake up and it will just be a beautiful dream,” the 82-year-old Lee said. Disbrow’s daughter Dianna Huhn, 55, of Portland, Ore., said the reunion has filled a void for her mother – one that for many years, the sharp, stylish woman with sparkling blue eyes kept a deep, dark secret. “I have never seen my mother as happy,” said Huhn.
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Mom, Now 100-Years-Old, Reunites with Lost Child After 77 Years
We have entered a new phase of the endless Occupy Wall Street sleepover. After a month of provoking the police, generating mounds of trash, begging for free WiFi, port-o-potties, and food, teaching each other Kamp Alinsky hand signals, railing against Jews while holding up “Nazi Bankers” signs, grappling with pervs and rapists and thieves in their ranks, and hobnobbing with 1 percent-er celebrities donning 99 percent-er costumes, the Occupiers are rallying around a new mascot: Robin Hood. From the Canadian magazine “ Adbusters ” that helped launch the protests comes a call for an October 29 “Robin Hood soak-the-rich tax” parade: Alright you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there, We’re living through a magical moment … #OCCUPYWALLSTREET has catalyzed into an international insurgency for democracy … the mood at our assemblies is electric … people who go there are drawn into a Gandhian spirit of camaraderie and hope for a new kind of future. Across the globe the 99% are marching! You have inspired more than you know. People are digging into Act One of the long Spring. Its now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful détournements of all kinds. Open your insurrectionary imagination. Anything, from a bottom-up transformation of the global economy to changing the way we eat, the way we get around, the way we live, love and communicate … be the spark that sustains a global revolution of everyday life! As the movement matures, lets consider a response to our critics. Lets occupy the core of our global system. Lets dethrone the greed that defines this new century. Lets work to define our one great demand. OCTOBER 29 – #ROBINHOOD GLOBAL MARCH This is a proposal for the general assemblies of the Occupy movement. Eight years ago, on February 15, 2003, upwards of 15 million people in sixty countries marched together to stop President Bush from invading Iraq … a huge chunk of humanity lived for one day without dead time and glimpsed the power of a united people’s movement. Now we have an opportunity to repeat that performance on an even larger scale. On October 29, on the eve of the G20 Leaders Summit in France, let’s the people of the world rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1% #ROBINHOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades. Let’s send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3-trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day – enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world. Take this idea to your local general assembly and join your comrades in the streets on October 29. Rest assured, the text of this manifesto will be chanted in that zombie human mic way in dingy occupier camps from NYC to San Francisco to every blue dot in between. As for coopting Robin Hood, I remind you of how the progs have his legacy upside down. Flashbook – Andrew Busch 2002: Of course, liberals prefer to see themselves as moral descendents of Robin Hood, rather than intellectual heirs of Hooverism. Democrats are frequently heard making the Robin Hood analogy in reverse, claiming that the Bush administration’s budget, including tax cuts and social spending restraint, would take from the poor and give to the rich. Leaving aside the detail that a tax cut allowing someone to keep more of his earnings is not “giving” him anything that is not already his, the adoption of Robin Hood as the patron saint of liberalism cries out for correction. To the contrary, it is conservatives who should extol Mr. Hood as one of their own. All one has to do is to consult the Disney films’ animated version of Robin Hood—as I did with my two small children last weekend—to find at least four reasons why one would not find Robin Hood voting for Al Gore or John Kerry if his feathered hat depended on it. 1. As one wag perceptively pointed out some time ago, Robin Hood’s claim to fame was not that he took from the rich to give to the poor, but that he took from the tax collector and gave back to the people their own money. The central issue was overtaxation, and Robin Hood was most emphatically not on the side of the bureaucracy. The ultimate bad guy was Prince John, the very caricature of greedy, arrogant government; the proximate bad guy was the Sheriff of Nottingham, the ruthless enforcer whose audit strategy was even more intimidating than that of the IRS. The victims were the taxpayers whose property was confiscated to feed John’s insatiable lust for higher revenues. As Robin Hood speeds to its exciting conclusion, Friar Tuck adopts as his battle cry, “Praise the Lord and pass the tax rebate!” 2. Robin Hood was waging a struggle not only against overtaxation but against illegitimate, unconstitutional government. As the characters ridicule “Prince John, the phony king of England,” they are staking their fight on the view that John has overstepped his legal and constitutional bounds. He had, in other words, gone beyond the exercise of powers rightfully his. Unimpressed with Prince John’s living constitution, which bore a disturbing resemblance to a regime of raw, unconstrained power, Robin Hood and his merry band seem to prefer a stricter construction. 3. At the same time, they are emboldened to resist John’s usurpation by a sense that acts of government must be tested not only against the written law but against natural law. John has violated not only the law of England, he has waged war against the law of God. The disrespect held by John and his minions for the law of God—or, to put it another way, their attempt to elevate his rule above any sort of limit, human or divine—is epitomized when the Sheriff of Nottingham robs even Friar Tuck’s church to pad the revenues. The idea of natural law can, of course, be put to a variety of uses, not all of which conservatives find agreeable, but one of the most distinct features of the modern left is a moral nihilism which denies the possibility of higher objective truth, and consequently denies the possibility of inherent limits on the ambitions of the state. To the extent that Robin Hood sought to hold John’s regime to an unwritten standard of limitation and accountability, modern liberals can hardly claim him as one of their own… “Praise the Lord and pass the tax rebate!” Can’t wait to see that on some giant banners at the Occupiers Oct. 29 event: *** Since they are such champions of robbing from the rich and redistributing to the poor, all those Occupier robbery victims in Zuccotti Park should stop complaining, yes?
Originally posted here:
Occupiers’ new mascot: Anti-tax crusader Robin Hood
Republican victories will bring on the adoption of a tried and true agenda, as described by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, to reduce Leftist government policies.
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A New Era: Americans Stop Obama in His Tracks
At FrontPage Magazine , David Horowitz has some background on his new book, Reforming Our Universities : The campaign we launched can only be understood in the context of previous developments in higher education. The modern research university was created in the second half of the 19 th Century during the era of America’s great industrial expansion, its curriculum shaped by two innovations: the adoption of scientific method as the professional standard for knowledge, and the extension of educational opportunity to a democratic public. Before these developments, America’s institutions of higher learning were “primarily religious and moral” schools of instruction. In the words of James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan, “colleges trained the ministers of each generation, passing on ‘high culture’ to a very small elite.” The avowed mission of these early collegiate institutions was to instill the doctrines of a particular religious denomination. It was not to foster the analytic skepticism associated with modern science but to pass on the literary and philosophical culture that supported a specific faith. By contrast, “the core mission of the research university,” as recently summarized by one of its leaders, “is … expanding and deepening what we know.” In pursuit of this goal, “the research university relies on various attributes, the most important of which are the processes of rigorous inquiry and reasoned skepticism, which in turn are based on articulated norms that are not fixed and given, but are themselves subject to re-examination and revision. In the best of our universities faculty characteristically subject their own claims and the norms that govern their research to this process of critical reflection.” This has been the credo of American higher education throughout the modern era and is still the norm in the physical and biological sciences and most professional schools throughout the contemporary university. Liberal arts colleges within the university are the divisions through which all undergraduates pass, and have been traditionally viewed as cornerstones of a democratic society, where students are taught how to think rather than told what to think. The curriculum of the modern research university supported these objectives. It was designed to inculcate pragmatic respect for the pluralism of ideas and the test of empirical evidence, and thus to support a society dependent on an informed citizenry. All this began to change when a radical generation of university instructors matriculated onto liberal arts faculties in the 1970s and began altering curricula by creating new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspirations were ideological, and closely linked to political activism. Women’s Studies was one of the earliest of these new fields and remains the most influential, providing an academic model emulated by others. The curricula of Women’s Studies programs are not governed by the principles of disinterested inquiry about a subject but rather by a political mission: to teach students to be radical feminists. The formal Constitution of the Women’s Studies Association makes this political agenda clear: Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias–from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others….Women’s Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter the society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression. Thirty years later, the academic landscape had undergone a sea change as a result of the political pressures from feminists, ethnic nationalists, and “anti-war” activists, and the curricular innovations they were able to institute. In 2006, state legislators in Pennsylvania gathered at Philadelphia’s Temple University to hold hearings on academic freedom. Among the witnesses was Stephen Zelnick, a former Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies and a member of the Temple faculty for 36 years. Zelnick told the legislators of his concern that Temple faculty had grown increasingly monolithic and politically partisan in the years he had been there: “The one-sidedness of the faculty in their ideological commitments and a growing intolerance of competing views [has] resulted in abuse of students, occasionally overt and reported, but most often hidden and normalized, and the degrading of the strong traditions of intellectual inquiry and free expression.” Zelnick then spelled out what this meant in terms of the instruction he had personally reviewed: “As director of two undergraduate programs, I have had many opportunities to sit in and watch instructors. I have sat in on more than a hundred different teachers’ classes and seen excellent, indifferent, and miserable teaching… In these visits, I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion.” I think I was lucky, especially as an undergraduate, but in graduate school as well, to have taken courses with very few of the radical, anti-Americanists that Horowitz’s discusses. In fact, I’d be perfectly willing to confess that I wasn’t much affected by hard-left activism in college, only inasmuch as I was a registered Democrat myself, sympathetic to civil rights, anti-poverty and other issues often central to the progressive agenda. It’s when I became a professor, and especially my experience at my college since the Iraq war in 2003, that I’ve come to fully appreciate how institutionalized is the radical left’s program of anti-Americanism and indoctrination. As some readers might recall, I’ve recently adopted a new textbook, American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship , and I’m thrilled that the text offers an uncommonly robust cultural approach while remaining objectively respectful of other nations and their unique historical and political trajectories. And in shifting my approach along with the book, I’m more frequently having students attempt to defend their more anti-American positions during discussions, and there’s been a couple of highly critical students who’ve been unable to acquit themselves when faced with some Socratic questioning. (And that’s interesting from a learning perspective, if it’s the case that ideology is crowding out critical thinking, which sounds obvious upon reflection.) And I know that my college has some hardline historians and sociologists pushing basically a neo-communist, post-materialist curriculum — heavy on the antiwar and racist/sexist oppression junk — although my political science colleagues are pretty balanced overall. I’ve had my run-ins with leftists over a lot of these issues, for example when I covered the campus screening of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which excoriated the U.S. market system as “evil.” My experience — and my recommendations — at the institutional level is to stand firm against the leftist backlash, which will include allegations of “hate speech” and so forth, while upholding values of rigorous engagement with the facts over ideology; and of course professionalism in interactions with others. And I’m happy to report that I’ve beat back attempts at censorship, and of course outside attacks — from folks like E.D. Kain and The Swashzone communists — that have been dismissed as gratuitous attempts at harassment. In any case, I encourage folks to read Restoring Our Universities , and also check in regularly at FrontPage Magazine and NewsReal Blog , where I’m now a contributing writer.
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Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill of Rights
