Perry Chiaramonte reports at Fox News:

The homeschooling boom is getting a new push due to opposition to Common Core, the controversial national education standard that some parents claim is using their children’s public school lessons to push a political agenda, according to critics of the Washington-backed curriculum.

North Carolina, already a home-schooling hotbed, saw a 14 percent rise last year in the number of students being educated at home, according to a report from Heartlander Magazine. Similar increases have been seen in Virginia, California and New York, according to education activists.

"If you look at national, and even state polls, you can see that the more familiar people become with Common Core, the more they dislike it," Bob Lubke of the North Carolina-based Civitas Institute is quoted as telling Fox News. "They feel like they are losing control of what their kids are learning."

"The uptick in homeschooling has become a trend across the nation over the past couple of years, even in states like New York and California,” Glyn Wright said, according to Fox News. "Americans have rejected the Common Core initiative because they are tired of unaccountable federal bureaucracy, especially when it comes to their child’s education, and because they are seeing first-hand the poor quality and content of the Standards that are meant to prepare children for the workforce instead of giving them a well-rounded, superior education."

Katherine Timpf reports at National Review:

A Nebraska school district has instructed its teachers to stop referring to students by "gendered expressions" such as "boys and girls," and use "gender inclusive" ones such as "purple penguins" instead.

"Don’t use phrases such as 'boys and girls,' 'you guys,' 'ladies and gentlemen,' and similarly gendered expressions to get kids' attention," instructs a training document given to middle-school teachers at the Lincoln Public Schools.

"The instructions were part of a list called '12 steps on the way to gender inclusiveness' developed by Gender Spectrum," National Review reports. Gender Spectrum is "an organization that 'provides education, training and support to help create a gender sensitive and inclusive environment for children of all ages'."

"We don’t get involved with gender preferences. We’re educating all kids," says Lincoln Superintendent Steve Joel. "We can’t be judgmental."

Parents in France are successfully revolting against the homosexualist indoctrination of their children in French schools, write Judith Reisman and Tom Hampson.

"Plans for homosexual marriage met with massive French opposition from the French people, and it looks like gender re-education has taken a major hit as well," say Reisman and Hampson at WND.

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Update: 1.4 Million French March Against Homosex "Marriage" 
French Protests: Marriage = One Man + One Woman
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Craig Bannister reports at CNSNews.com:

Pres. Obama says spending on "less productive" things "like prisons" is driving up tuition costs. In an interview discussing his plan to cap student loan repayments, Obama said:

"The main reason that tuition has gone up so much is that state legislatures stopped subsidizing public universities as much as they used to, in part because they started spending money on things like prisons and other activities that I think are less productive.  And so schools then made up for the declining state support by jacking up their tuition rates."

Read more.

Warner Todd Huston reports at Breitbart:

The mother of a Jewish Chicago Public Schools (CPS) student tried for weeks to get the CPS to address the anti-Semitic bullying being perpetrated against her eighth-grader, but little was done until the parent contacted local media. The bullying got so bad that kids had joined an online game with a team called the "Jew Incinerators."

On May 23, Chicago's CBS affiliate reported on the story of a student at the Ogden International School who suffered constant anti-Semitic taunts for weeks. The hate grew so bad that the bullies created a team for the online game Clash of Clans that they named the "Jew Incinerator Clan."

To describe the team, the kids wrote, "Heil! Throw Jews into ovens for a cause. We are a friendly group of racists with one goal -– put all Jews into an army camp until disposed of. Sieg! Heil!"

"It's disturbing," Lisa Wolf Clemente, parent of the eight-grader is quoted as saying. "They're using a game as a catalyst to truly spread hate."

"I’m 42 years old. I’m not new to this world," Clemente told a local CBS outlet, quoted by Breitbart. "I didn’t become Jewish yesterday. I felt naive and shocked. We are in the year 2014. Really? At a school that my son has gone to? And I shake because I watched this group grow literally from four. Kids were just joining and joining."

According to Breitbart, "Mrs. Clemente tried several times to get authorities at the school to respond to her requests for action, but it wasn't until the media began to talk about the incident that action was taken."

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In the face of legal action threatened by attorneys from Liberty Institute, Broward County Public Schools have "capitulated and will allow Bibles into the classroom," reports Ken Klukowski at Breitbart.

"In a letter dated Sunday, May 18, first obtained by Breitbart News, the school system has completely reversed course," Klukowski writes. "The letter tells Liberty Institute Litigation Director Hiram Sasser that the school 'does not ban the Bible' and specifies that students may read it during the same class times when it had been previously barred. The letter also says that the school will comply with Liberty Institute’s demand that all teachers be trained in what the Constitution requires by way of upholding students' First Amendment rights."

"Park Lakes Elementary School teacher Swornia D. Thomas [photo] reportedly reprimanded student Giovanni Rubeo for bringing his Bible to class, according to the Institute," the Washington Times reports. The school teacher "then ordered" Giovanni "to hand the Bible over and 'get his father on the phone,' the nonprofit said," according to the Washington Times.

In this voicemail, elementary school teacher Swornia Thomas says Giovanni "is not permitted to read those books in my classroom."

Fox News reports:

Officials at East Carolina University are telling students to disregard instructions from a chemistry professor who told them they were prohibited from mentioning God during a departmental graduation ceremony.

In an email obtained by Campus Reform, Assistant Professor Eli Hvastkovs told his students to prepare "family friendly" statements for the chemistry department's recognition event. He said the remarks should refrain from mentioning God. 

"University officials told WNCT-TV the email was not authorized by the school and that the incident is being used to boost awareness of students' free speech rights," Fox continues.

"In a separate email to chemistry students this week, ECU Provost Dr. Marilyn Sheerer said that religious references 'of any type' will not be restricted," according to Fox.

"These statements can be your personal expressions and as such the University will only limit these expressions, as permitted by applicable First Amendment law," Sheerer is quoted as saying.

"In an interview with Campus Reform last week, Hvastkovs defended the e-mail, which he said was necessary because too many students recognized religious figures during last year's ceremony," Fox reports.

"It's not a religious ceremony," Hvastkovs is quoted as saying. "It's purely educational."

Comment: Officials at East Carolina University are correct in their decision to tell students to disregard instructions that prohibit the mention of God during a chemistry department graduation ceremony.

For one thing, there is nothing in chemical science that prohibits the Creator. In fact, it's the other way around, for God is a science-starter, not a science-stopper. Chemists or professors of chemistry who believe in materialism or naturalistic philosophy may reject the concept of a Creator, but this is their philosophy talking, not their science talking. And it is poor philosophy at that.

Second, there is nothing in the First Amendment that prohibits science students, or any student of any academic discipline in the United States, from thanking God during graduation. Again, it's quite the other way around. What the First Amendment places limits upon is Congress (not students) -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Needless to say, students of East Carolina University are not Congress. And whether such students decide to thank God or not, this is a matter of no Constitutional concern to the federal government.

Regarding the professor's comment that graduation is an "educational" ceremony, not a "religious" one, I should point out the Judeo-Christian worldview is in no way "religious" in the manner that the professor seems to have in view. This worldview is profoundly pro-education.

The Judeo-Christian worldview is open to verification, for example, to questioning and critical thinking, and does not ask for commitment divorced from facts, empirical evidence, or solid reasoning. That view of "faith" is sub-Biblical and speaks more of a dumbed-down secularism or age-old gnosticism that no thinking, creative person serious about the basic questions of life ought to embrace.

The thought-forms expressed in the data of the Judeo-Christian worldview encourage science, encourage the life of the mind, and encourage the wholistic, non-hypocritical application of truth across all of life.

It is the sort of thing that if true, ought to be affirmed but that, if false, ought to be rejected. I must say, as a free-thinker, this is a mentality I greatly appreciate.

The whole point is that of verifiable and knowable truth that sets human beings free -- across the whole of life and in the depths of human existence.

For what reason? So that human beings might experience substantial healing in relationship to the Creator, to our fellow man, and to the cosmos.

Nothing could be more natural than that students and professors of chemistry (and even chemistry itself) express the thankfulness that arises in response to the verifiable Ultimate Person who embedded the possibility of chemistry in the natural order in the first place.

Education is doxology. It leaves religion far behind.

Bob Unruh writes at WND:

Americans now are being blasted as "racist" for the simple act of waving an American flag.

It happened Monday in California to a small group of protesters who waved U.S. flags in front of a school where officials had banned the practice to avoid violence threatened by Hispanic students celebrating Cinco de Mayo.

The controversy developed in 2010, when school officials ordered students not to wear U.S. flag-themed shirts on the Mexican holiday. The ban has been upheld by a federal appeals court.

The controversy brought a small group of protesters out Monday, and the community reacted immediately.

“What’s wrong with these white people holding up American flags in Morgan hill??? Racist a-holes,” wrote Gia Lee in a feed monitored by Twitchy.

"The report also noted the school superintendent was confirming that students wearing American flag-themed shirts on Monday 'won’t be kicked out," according to Unruh at WND. "Read that sentence again and then cringe at the fact that had to be said in the United States,' the Twitchy report said."

Unruh also writes that the "San Francisco Chronicle reported a group called Gilroy-Morgan Hill Patriots stood in front of Live Oak High School for about an hour waving American flags.

"The protest followed the decision earlier this year by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that school officials, in a dispute four years ago, were right to suspend the First Amendment rights of students who wanted to wear U.S. flag-themed shirts on Cinco de Mayo."

Here is the website for Live Oak High School. The principal is Lloyd Webb.

So says Joe Scarborough of MSNBC.

Memo to Joe: Having the 1st Lady of the United States show up to speak might have been a big deal in the past. That is no longer the case.

Hilary White reports at LifeSiteNews.com:

This week, a group of parents told the city administration in the small Tuscan town of Pontassieve that they would not go along with the introduction of the homosexualist "gender" ideology in their schools.

The parents addressed the proposed "ECOS -- Deconstructing to Build" program that aims to "help eliminate the stereotypes associated with gender." Parents quoted the Italian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights that say in the area of public education, the state "must respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions." The school, they said, "must not invade the field of education within the family."

The parents said, "The appropriate and necessary fight against bullying and all forms of discrimination cannot be manipulated by anyone or used to spread messages of other kinds, such as the affirmation of gender identity."

"While a project to make 'diversity education' standard throughout Italy’s schools has been successfully blocked in Parliament, the same work is proceeding at the municipal level," White reports. "It was recently blasted by the Archbishop of Turin who called it an attempt to turn local schools into 're-education camps' for the extreme left."

LifeSiteNews also reports that, "at the same time, a set of government guidelines instructs journalists never to portray homosexuals or 'transsexuals' in a negative light. The document, created according to a mandate by the Council of Europe, threatens journalists with unnamed 'professional sanctions' and even possible jail time for failing to comply."

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Transgender Politics and the Facts of Life 
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Kirsten Andersen reports at LifeSiteNews:

A North Carolina Roman Catholic school [held a meeting April 2] to address the concerns of parents and students who say they are outraged about remarks a visiting nun made criticizing homosexuality, divorce, and sex outside of marriage during a recent speech.

Dominican Sister Jane Dominic Laurel, who often speaks to high school and college-age students on matters of sexuality, gave an hour-long presentation to students at Charlotte Catholic High School on March 21 called "Masculinity and Femininity: Difference and Gift." School officials told the Catholic News Herald she spent about half her allotted time discussing homosexuality, blaming its rising influence in part on fatherless homes created by divorce and extramarital sex. . . .

Although the Catholic Church has always held both homosexual behavior and sex outside of marriage to be gravely sinful, students and parents at the Catholic school reacted to her remarks with shock and anger, launching both an online petition and a letter-writing campaign calling the sister’s words "offensive and unnecessarily derogatory."

"Not all students were upset by the nun’s presentation," LifeSiteNews reports. "A group of students who adhere to Catholic teaching on sexuality have launched a counter-petition condemning the protesters’ actions. 'We are outraged that the topics talked about are being debated within a community where the shared faith teaches us what truly is holy and that anyone would stand up against a nun, who has given her life for the Lord, and blantly [sic] deny God's teachings,' the petition reads."

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Ilya Feoktistov writes at Frontpagemag.com:

A young man from Brookline, Massachusetts poses for a photo somewhere inside the Palestinian territories. He’s got a bullet belt wrapped around his shoulders, wannabe-Rambo-style. Together with a young woman, he’s proudly showing off a terror group’s PK-class machine gun. A gun like that can take down a helicopter or pierce a Humvee’s armor. The AR-15 "assault" gun used to massacre the children of Newtown, CT is little better than an old hunting rifle compared to the firing power of this killing machine, whose likely main purpose is to massacre the children (and adults) of Israel.

The young man is Max Geller, leader and spokesman of Northeastern University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (NU SJP). The young woman is also a NU SJP member.

Last week, Northeastern suspended NU SJP after years of anti-Semitic vandalism, glorification of terrorist groups, calls for the destruction of Israel, and other actions by NU SJP’s leadership, all of which have created a hostile learning environment for Jewish pro-Israel students on campus. . . .

Here is Northeastern's "Statement on Students for Justice in Palestine," dated March 17, 2014.

Read more on "Northeastern U. Suspends 'Students for Justice in Palestine'."

Terry Jeffrey writes at CNSNews.com:

Will America be a better and freer country three decades from now if the children who turn four in this decade spend most of their waking hours with members of a government teachers union rather than with their moms?

President Barack Obama's vision of America, not surprisingly, starts with very young children spending their time in the custody of government employees.

"I believe we should start teaching our kids at the earliest ages," Obama said last week. When he used the word "we" here, Obama was not talking about Michelle and himself, he was talking about the government. When he used the words "our kids," he was not talking about his own children -- who attend the most expensive private school in Washington, D.C. -- he was talking about other people's children and grandchildren.

What Obama wants, quite literally, is their souls.

"So we're trying to help more states make high-quality preschool and other early learning programs available to the youngest kids," Obama went on, prosaically. The budget he presented to Congress was more concrete: It calls for $75 billion in federal spending over the next 10 years to support universal government "education" of 4-year-olds.

If you think Obama is satisfied with taking the 4-year-olds of America, think again.

"I think that there still needs to be great understanding of what the president has put on the table is really a birth-to-five proposal, recognizing that you can't start at 4-year-olds," Jeffrey quotes Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as saying in April 2013 at the National Press Club.

"We really need to start at birth," Sebelius is also quoted as saying. "So, there will be an enhancement of home-visiting. . . ."

If I thought the secularist vision of life held intellectual weight, I would in all likelihood advocate similar policies, for what Obama & Co. are pushing is consistent with that vision's glorified view of the state and depressed view of the individual person, the family, and all else that might provide a check and balance on the governmental monopoly of power.

But the theocracy of secularism, which wars against the rules of freedom, lacks the intellectual and ethical resources to sustain human freedom and dignity. It is a conceptual and practical dead end.  

Rather than submit to a metastasizing regime, it seems better that free-thinking Americans rise up, speak out, and throw out these totalitarian control freaks. It's called the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the essence of being human, and liberating resistance in community with God and man.

Read more on "Federalizing 4-Year-Olds," by Terry Jeffrey.

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Dr. Susan Berry reports at Breitbart.com:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has verbally informed the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) that the Romeike family, German homeschoolers who sought legal asylum in the United States, has been granted indefinite deferred action status, which means that the order for their removal from the United States will not be acted upon.

As Breitbart News reported Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court had denied the Romeike family’s petition for certiorari, or review. According to a press release Tuesday by HSLDA, however, news of the Supreme Court’s denial sparked "an immediate and unprecedented reaction." Fox News informed HSLDA that it recorded one million page views of the story about the Romeike family within 24 hours -- an all-time high.

"HSLDA Director of International Affairs Michael Donnelly observed that the only reason the Romeike family had to come to America was because of Germany’s repressive policy towards homeschoolers," Breitbart reports.

"Germany’s persecution of homeschooling parents continues and is one reason, I suspect, that DHS was willing to grant the family indefinite status," Donnelly said in the March 4 press statement.

"How could our country send this loving, peaceful family back to be crushed by outrageous fines, criminal prosecution, and the loss of their children?," also said in the press statement. "Today Germany is holding another family prisoner only because they wanted to leave to go to France to homeschool their children. How could we send the Romeikes back to be treated like that?"

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Ericka Andersen writes at The Foundry:

An actress who was formerly quiet about her political beliefs has come out against what she calls "a progressive agenda" in America’s public schools.

Sam Sorbo, the wife of Hercules actor Kevin Sorbo, homeschools her children and recently began publicly writing about the topic of education.

In an interview with The Blaze’s Dana Loesch, Sorbo said she initially did not think writing about education would cause much political controversy -- but she was wrong.

"Of course school is the most political, because that’s where the progressive agenda is coming out the strongest and the hardest," Sorbo is quoted as saying. 

According to Andersen, "Sorbo said she was hesitant to reveal her faith or political beliefs publicly because of possible backlash and negative reaction from Hollywood. But she could not remain silent on education."

"You people who send your kids to school, you have no idea what the schools are doing to their fresh little brains, in brainwashing them into this progressive, liberal -- it’s antithetical to America, the agenda that they’re being indoctrinated with," Sorbo said, according to Andersen.

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Where Do Public School Teachers Send Their Own Kids?

Christina Hoff Sommers writes at Time magazine:

Being a boy can be a serious liability in today’s classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won’t sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study, leads teachers to underestimate their intellectual and academic abilities.

“Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools," says psychologist Michael Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”

"These 'defective girls' are not faring well academically," Sommers continues. "Compared with girls, boys earn lower grades, win fewer honors and are less likely to go to college. One education expert has quipped that if current trends continue, the last male will graduate from college in 2068. In today’s knowledge-based economy, success in the classroom has never been more crucial to a young person’s life prospects. Women are adapting; men are not."

Christina Hoff Sommers is author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men.

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Lucy Kinder reports at the UK Telegraph:

University students in America have been told not to wear "offensive" Halloween costumes including cowboys, Indians, and anything involving a sombrero.

Students at the University of Colorado Boulder have also been told to avoid "white trash" costumes and anything that portrays a particular culture as "over-sexualised" -- which the university says includes dressing up as a geisha or a "squaw" (indigenous woman).

According to Kinder, "A university spokesman called cowboy costumes a 'crude stereotype'."

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Larry Elder writes:

Urban public school teachers are about two times more likely than non-teachers to send their own children to private schools. . . .

One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44 percent of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools.

In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41 and 39 percent of public school teachers, respectively, pay for a private school education for their children.

In Rochester, N.Y., it’s 38 percent. In Baltimore it’s 35 percent, San Francisco is 34 percent, and New York-Northeastern New Jersey is 33 percent.

In Los Angeles nearly 25 percent of public school teachers send their kids to private school versus 16 percent of all Angelenos who do so.

Relate
Spying on School Kids 
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David Urbanski reports at The Blaze:

One school district in the Amarillo, Texas, area isn’t messing around when it comes to potential intruders.

The Shamrock Independent School District has added two signs warning troublemakers that staff members are armed and may use force to protect its 450 students.

Photos that accompany the news story show that the signs state the following: "Attention. Please be aware that the staff at Shamrock ISD is armed and may use whatever force is necessary to protect our students."

The school district has also "installed 30 security cameras as well as an intercom system and bulletproof windows," and "according to KHOU-TV in Houston, most parents are happy with the stepped-up security," the Blaze reports. 

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According to AZCentral.com, students in an Arizona high school performed  

The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? by Edward Albee, an absurdist play in which one of the characters falls in love with a goat. It includes the use of several vulgar sexual terms. . . .

In the play, a middle-aged man leads an ideal life with his wife and teenage son, until he admits that he is also in love with a goat named Sylvia, with whom he has had sex. The play explores themes of tolerance, morality and revenge, and includes scenes of homosexuality and incest.  

I remember this play well -- I wrote about it in Total Truth. But at the time, I did not anticipate that it would filter down to the high school level. Here's what I said there to explain the worldview backdrop: 

In the past, it was Christians who warned that Darwinian evolution would ultimately destroy morality, by reducing it to behavioral patterns selected only for their survival value. Back then, evolutionists would often respond with soothing reassurances that getting rid of God would not jeopardize morality -- that “we can be good without God.” But in recent years, evolutionists themselves have begun bluntly declaring that the theory undercuts the basis of ­morality.

For example, biologist William Provine of Cornell travels the lecture circuit telling university students that the Darwinian revolution is still incomplete, because we have not yet embraced all its moral and religious implications. What are those implications? Provine lists them: “There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.” Thus evolutionary psychologists are simply completing the Darwinian revolution by drawing out its full implications. They are connecting the dots, by showing what consistent Darwinism means for morality.

The results can be quite abhorrent. A few years ago, conservative commentators around the country gave a collective gasp when an article appeared by a Princeton University professor supporting -- of all things -- sexual relations between humans and animals. The professor was Peter Singer, already notorious for his support of animal rights. (Apparently we ­didn’t realize what kind of rights he meant . . . ­)

The article was titled “Heavy Petting,” and in it Singer makes it clear that his real target is biblical morality. In the West, he writes, we have a “Judeo-Christian tradition” that teaches that “humans alone are made in the image of God.” “In Genesis, God gives humans dominion over the animals.” But evolution has thoroughly refuted the biblical account, Singer maintains: Evolution teaches us that “We are animals” -- and the result is that “sex across the species barrier [isn’t that a scientific-sounding euphemism?] ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human ­beings.”

These sentiments do not remain carefully contained within academia, but trickle down into popular culture -- where they have a much greater impact on the public. In 2002 a play opened on Broadway to rave reviews called The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia? featuring a successful architect who confesses to his wife that he has fallen in love with someone else. The object of his affection turns out to be a goat named Sylvia. Apparently, playwrights no longer feel that they can get enough dramatic tension out of an ordinary affair; to really create drama, they must probe the theme of ­bestiality.

A culture is driven by a kind of logic: It will eventually begin to express the logical consequences of the dominant worldview. If evolution is true -- if there really is an unbroken continuity between humans and animals -- then Singer is absolutely right about what he calls “sex across the species ­barrier.”

Once again, all the dots connect back to your view of ­origins.

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And should be changed. In an article titled "Common Core Assignment," Joe Newby writes at Examiner.com:

A mother in the Bryant School District in Arkansas
-- a district using the controversial Common Core curriculum -- was surprised to learn her sixth-grade daughter was given a team assignment to revise the Bill of Rights, pruning two amendments from the Constitution while adding two others, Twitchy reported Monday, citing a report at the Digital Journal.

The assignment made the assumption that the United States government has determined that the Bill of Rights "is outdated and may not remain in its current form any longer." 

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A CBS affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth reports:

A lot of schools spend countless hours trying to stop bullying. But some question if they are sending the right message.

It started as a simple look at bullying. University of Texas at Arlington criminologist Seokjin Jeong analyzed data collected from 7,000 students from all 50 states.

He thought the results would be predictable and would show that anti-bullying programs curb bullying. Instead -- he found the opposite.

Jeong said it was, “A very disappointing and a very surprising thing. Our anti-bullying programs, either intervention or prevention does not work.”

But how surprising is this, really, especially if some of the "anti-bullying"campaigns are themselves "unsafe"?

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Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat

David Klinghoffer writes at Evolutionnews.org:

A chemistry professor at the University of Iowa got slammed recently by colleagues for voicing the view that Darwinian evolutionary theory has "holes . . . that are big enough to drive a semi-truck through."

The professor, Ned Bowden, was writing in an official university publication, Iowa Now, and 25 of his fellow faculty members took umbrage.

They signed a collectively authored letter chastising him, reminding Dr. Bowden that Evolution Is a Fact -- "we no longer debate the central principles of evolutionary theory as a scientific framework for understanding Earth's diversity" -- and chiding Iowa Now for publishing the piece and thereby doing "a disservice to the university."

Klinghoffer notes that "Bowden's remark about the semi-truck is actually in the context of a very mild article, 'Common Ground: A Case for Ending the Animosity Between Science and Religion,' expressing the general view that science and religion need not conflict.

In the article Bowden "makes crystal clear that he is no Young Earth Creationist -- 'I have utter confidence in radioactive dating'," Klinghoffer quotes Bowden as saying.

"There's not a word about intelligent design either," Klinghoffer observes. "In fact he uses a standard theistic evolutionary formulation about how 'it is highly possible that evolution was the tool that God used to bring humans into being.'

"Poor guy!," Klinghoffer writes. "Many theistic evolutionists -- not, I'm sure, Dr. Bowden, who seems very sincere -- embrace the idea because it's supposed to protect you from attack by Darwinists. So that's a prophylactic, like some others I can think of, that's not 100 percent effective after all."

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Bradley Monton, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, identifies himself as an atheist. But in his book Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, he explains why he thinks teaching students about the concept of a designer for nature is good pedagogy. 

From an interview in Salvo:

Stop the presses. It turns out that philosophy majors can actually make money after graduation: $81,200 annually, the data indicate.  

This is according to "Annual Salary" information collected since 2008 on the "median salary of mid-career graduates without higher degrees," as stated by this chart (click on image to enlarge, scroll to bottom) that appears on the website of Colorado State University. 

A salary of $81,200 means philosophy majors outperform their counterparts who majored in sociology, psychology, art history, English literature, biology, history, business, political science, and chemistry.  

In addition, philosophy majors rank at the very top (with math majors) when it comes to salary growth, meaning the "increase from starting to mid-career median salary of graduates without higher degrees," according to a companion "Salary Growth" chart.

So, whether you are working through Francis Schaeffer's "Basic Philosophic Questions," taking Nancy Pearcey's apologetics classes at HBU, or exploring some of our worldview articles at The Pearcey Report, rejoice: There's bankable gold in them there cogitations. 

Or like Descartes almost said: I think, therefore, I earn.

HT: Gary Hartenburg

Readers of The Pearcey Report may be interested know that I will be speaking at the Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature on the campus of Houston Baptist University on Friday at 2:15. My talk draws on themes from Saving Leonardo and is titled, "Recovering Our Virtue: Does Dickens Succeed in Overcoming the Fact/Value Split in Hard Times?"

In the novel Hard Times Dickens is doing battle with philosophies like empiricism and utilitarianism, which had come to dominate the public sphere of politics and economics. Writing at the height of the industrial revolution, Dickens realized that the impact of these philosophies was reductionistic and dehumanizing, and he raises the question: In an age where Truth has been identified solely with empirical fact, what is the truth status of Goodness and Beauty?

Dickens knew that the outstanding philosopher of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, had undergone a personal crisis (related in Saving Leonardo). He recasts Mill's story as the plot line in the novel.

Here is a brief preview of my remarks:

When John Stuart Mill was born, his father was close friends with Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. They decided to turn the boy into a kind of experiment: They would educate him from a young age to become a prophet for their utilitarian creed.

And it worked. As a young man, Mill was brilliant. He was writing for professional journals, he had founded several intellectual societies, and he was heralded as the crown prince of an influential utilitarian movement in politics.

But at the age of twenty, Mill suffered a mental crisis. As he wrote in his Autobiography, it came crashing down on him that he had been turned into little more than a "reasoning machine." He felt he had been robbed of entire dimensions of life.

So intense was Mill's depression that he compared himself with someone on the threshold of a religious conversion. Yet he did not find a resolution to his crisis in religion. Instead, he found it in poetry. His depression lifted when he discovered the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the other Romantics.

Now, however, he was faced with a dilemma. The discovery of poetry and beauty had saved his life. But his philosophy did not allow for any form of truth except the empirical and the quanitfiable.

How would Mill resolve the conflict?

And how would Dickens resolve the conflict in his fictional treatment of the same issues? Most importantly, how can we stand against the inhumane reductionism and scientism of our own age and assert once again that Goodness and Beauty are rooted in Truth?

According to the conference website, online registration "is $85 per professional ($95 at the door) or $55 per graduate student ($65 at the door) and includes the Friday dinner meal. In addition, all registrants must be current members of Conference on Christianity and Literature. The membership rates are $35 per year or $60 for two years."

On the topic of conferences, Rick and I are excited to announce that we are developing plans for conferences where together we address the critical challenges of our day, in light of the liberating and reality-oriented principles set forth in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Stayed tuned for updates on this initiative.

Mark Tapson writes at Frontpagemag.com:

Last week at more than 200 colleges and high schools across the nation, students came together to arrange memorials on campus featuring thousands of flags representing each victim of Islamic terrorism on that date.

Who could find that gesture offensive?

Five student protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont, brainwashed by multiculturalist nonsense, that’s who.

For an exploration into the "mind" of an "'anarchaqueer' who 'hates the police' and whose goal is to 'dismantle all systems of oppression,'" and who "decided to respect the massacred dead by dismantling a 9/11 memorial respectful of massacred Americans," read Tapscott's column here.

"Remember," Tapscott concludes, "this is a woman ["queer" Amanda Lickers, photo] who was invited to facilitate a workshop on settler responsibility and decolonization on campus, so there are students at Middlebury supportive enough of her radical multiculturalism to attend a workshop and at least one person there -- a professor or administrator -- with the authority to invite her. Hopefully her vandalism and subsequent unhinged statement will give them second thoughts about asking her back."

See Also
Extremist Prof Arrested After Profane Tirade at Pro-Life Students 
Campus Rape Victim: "I Was in a Safe Zone and My Attacker Didn't Care" 
"Gay" Totalitarianism

It's all too easy to bemoan the problem -- studies show clearly that growing up fatherless greatly increases the chances of a host of social pathologies, from poverty to drugs to violence.

Here's a program that is working on a positive solution: The City University of New York (CUNY) Fatherhood Academy, part of the university's Young Men’s Initiative, is a free, five-month, three-day-a-week program that helps young fathers, from age 18 to 24, earn a GED, prepare for college, get work experience, explore careers, and learn about topics like parenthood.

Seron Douglas, a recent grad of the program, and a single dad of a four-year-old, said, "The program has helped me become a man. I grew up without a father so I had no one to look up to or to learn from. The academy taught me what a father teaches a son -- how to speak to people and how to present myself. It changed my life."

Through the program, he landed a job as a bartender at the U.S. Open, and after this stint he is hoping to find a permanent part-time job with the help of the program. "I am thinking about my future and my son’s future,” said Seron. “I will go to college, get a good job. I never talked like this before."

According to the CUNY Fatherhood Academy, one in three children under the age of 18 in New York City grows up without a dad. This crisis disproportionately impacts the city’s black and Latino children, as 51 percent of black and 46 percent of Latino children are being raised in fatherless households, compared to 11 percent of white children.

"Those statistics change when we introduce education as well as employment -- they change drastically," said program coordinator Raheem Brooks. "Fathers are more present in their children's lives, which then affects poverty."

For more, check out these sources:

* CUNY Fatherhood Academy Helps Young Dads 
* Free NYC Program Helps Young Fathers Get on the Right Track 
* CUNY Fatherhood Academy at LaGuardia Community College Makes Difference in Young Men’s Lives

It was an honor to deliver the annual faculty in-service training at Southern Adventist University (SAU) a couple of weeks ago. I started with a presentation on making the "Case for Christianity Across the Curriculum" to explore how to incorporate verifiable Biblical truth and apologetics into the subject matter of every discipline on campus.

I followed up with "Speaking Truth to a Secular Age," giving concrete examples on how to "translate" reality-oriented Biblical principles from religious jargon into the language of today’s secularized world, and to do so without compromise. Most students at Christian colleges will go to work in the public sphere, and they need learn how to speak authentically and persuasively from a factual Biblical perspective into the challenges that beset their chosen fields of work.

My final presentation focused on what to expect from incoming students -- what worldview is most common among young people today? -- and how to "Give Students a Biblical Playbook."

The Boston Herald reports:

The state Supreme Judicial Court will begin hearing arguments this week in an atheist Acton couple’s quest to strike the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance their children say in the Acton-Boxboro Regional School District.

Related 
Home Depot Fires Man for Wearing "Under God" Pin: Video
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White House Correspondent Doesn't Stand for Pledge of Allegiance 
Double Bogey: NBC Edits Out "Under God" From Pledge
Democrat Activists Behind School Ban on Pledge of Allegiance 
The Declaration of Independence

Todd Starnes writes at Fox News:

Parents at a Wichita, Kan. elementary school were shocked to discover a giant wall display inside the building promoting the five pillars of Islam.

The large exhibit was erected before the start of the school year as part of a religion component being taught at Minneha Core Knowledge Magnet School, a school district spokesperson told Fox News.

"The bulletin board that originally caused the concern does represent the 5 Pillars of Islam -- in a historical context of their studies," the spokesman is quoted as saying. 

According to Starnes, "The district said the photograph of the bulletin board is misleading because it is 'without context'."

"There is also a painting of the Last Supper hanging in the school as part of the study of art and the Renaissance period," the spokesman is also quoted as saying. "A photo take of a bulletin board without context is misleading, and some have taken it out of context without having all the information."

"Nevertheless," Starnes writes, "the school has removed the Islamic bulletin board until the subject matter is taught later this fall."

Related
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Florida Megachurch Pastor's Ties to Islamists

Becky Yeh writes at OneNewsNow:

With the stroke of a pen on Monday, California became the first state to enshrine rights for transgender students in state law -- setting the stage, say pro-family leaders, for young girls to be molested in school locker rooms by boys who believe they are girls.

Without comment, California Governor Jerry Brown yesterday signed into law a bill (AB 1266) strengthening the rights of transgender students (K-12) in the state’s public schools.

It makes the Golden State the first state in the nation to allow participation in "sex-segregated programs, activities, and facilities" in public schools based on a student's gender identity.

Under the new law, public schools will be required to allow the students access to whichever restroom and locker room they want -- and it would allow boys to take showers with girls just because they say they feel they are female.

"It's an outrageous and egregious violation of the privacy and decency for young women and young girls all throughout the state of California,” Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute is quoted as saying. "This new law will even allow boys to play on girl's athletic teams. So this is a serious violation of the fundamental right of young people up and down the state of California."

All of this is allowed "under the guise of providing special rights and protections for children with a gender-identity disorder," Yeh writes. "If a boy wants to molest a girl, he can follow her into a restroom and violate her."

Comment: To paraphrase bluesy rocker Janis Joplin, freedom's just another word for no privacy left to lose.

Inalienable rights -- rooted in the Creator, as opposed to sociological fads posing as "rights," left, right, or center -- lift a people up and help to set them free. But phony rights, even when duly enacted into law by people wearing suits and ties, hurt them and bring them down. A culture can drown in the sewage of its "mainstream."

Related
Don't Worry, Ladies, It Was a Transgender Spy Cam 
College Lets Transgender Man Expose Himself to Young Girls 
The "Gay" Anti-Science

Bob Unruh writes at WND:

The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed in a court filing it agrees with the philosophy of the German government that bureaucrats can punish homeschooling parents.

And the agency explained parental rights to keep their children free from instruction that violates their faith essentially are negligible when the government’s goal is an "open society."

The arguments were made in a pleading before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that encourages the judges to send a German homeschooling family, the Romeikes, back to Germany where members likely would face persecution.

"The goal in Germany is for an 'open, pluralistic society,'" wrote the government’s pleading, signed by Senior Litigation Counsel Robert N. Markle in Washington. So, he said, there is a law requiring attendance by all at government schools and punishment is levied against anyone failing to comply, whether they are truant or have religious objections to the indoctrination at the public schools. . . .

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which is fighting on behalf of the family, said, Germany’s actions amount to persecution -- a platform on which the Romeikes should be granted asylum.

"'Silencing the "intolerant" to promote tolerance is not only illogical; it is antithetical to any theory of freedom of conscience,' the organization argued earlier," reports WND.

WND also reports that a "Nazi-era law in Germany in 1938, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, eliminated exemptions that would provide an open door for homeschoolers under the nation’s compulsory education laws."

Related
Homeschoolers Told: Go Back to Persecution 
Houston Baptist U in Top 10 "Best Colleges for Homeschool Graduates" 
Thoughtcamp Watch: Brits to Tighten Screws on Homeschooling?

Margaret Hartmann reports at NYMagazine:

The latest school assignment infuriating New York parents comes from Jessica Barrish, a new English teacher at York Prep, who had students as young as 14 write suicide notes from the perspective of a character in The Secret Life of Bees last month.

Related
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Texas High School Student Suspended for Saying Homosexuality Is Wrong

A bully with a knife had a classmate in a headlock and could slit his throat at any moment.

Seventh-grader Briar MacLean of Calgary intervened and protected the boy from this immediate threat. 

But "instead of getting a pat on the back for his bravery, Briar was made to feel as if he had done something terribly wrong. The police were called, the teen filed a statement and his locker was searched," Jen Gerson reports at the National Post.

Briar's mother was "politely informed" by the vice principal that the school "did not 'condone heroics'" and that her son Brian "should have found a teacher to handle the situation."

The mother asked the vice principal, "In the time it would have taken him to go get a teacher, could that kid’s throat have been slit?"

The vice principal "said yes, but that’s beside the point," the Post reports. We "don’t condone heroics in this school."

Related
Public Schools Turning Teens Into Relativists
Texas High School Student Suspended for Saying Homosexuality Is Wrong
Mandated Curriculum: "Everything I Love About Teaching Is Extinct" 

Chelsea Schilling reports at WND:

In unapologetic defiance of a South Carolina school district’s ban on prayer at graduation ceremonies, valedictorian Roy Costner IV shredded his approved speech and rocked the crowd at his high-school commencement -- with a reading of the "Lord’s Prayer." 

The audience went wild June 1 when Costner surprised attendees of the Liberty High School graduation at Clemson’s Littlejohn Colliseum with his tribute to the Almighty.

Immediately after he took the stage, Costner explained to the crowd that his original graduation speech had been pre-approved by the administration -- but he didn’t proceed as they had planned.

"Those that we look up to, they have helped carve and mold us into the young adults that we are today," Costner said.

"I’m so glad that both of my parents led me to the Lord at a young age," the Valedictorian continued.

"And I think most of you will understand when I say, 'Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done: on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever. Amen.'"

As this YouTube video demonstrates and WND reports, "The crowd roared with support."

Well done, Roy Costner IV.

Related 
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Cal Thomas v. Star Parker: Should Ben Carson Apologize to Obama for Prayer Breakfast Remarks? 
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Andy Kessler at the Wall Street Journal highlights a major move toward online education:

[Georgia Tech] is making major waves in business and higher education with its May 14 announcement that the college will offer the first online master's degree in computer science -- and that the degree can be had for a quarter of the cost of a typical on-campus degree.

"Many other universities are experimenting with open online courses, or MOOCs, but Georgia Tech's move raises the bar significantly by offering full credit in a graduate program," Kessler writes.

"Sadly," Kessler continues, this experiment is "not without controversy."

Jonathon M. Seidl reports at The Blaze on a teacher who "Resigns in Scathing YouTube Video Targeting Standardized Education."

Seidl writes:

"This is a total kangaroo court, a retaliation against four teachers who are quite vocal in advocating for their children," Rubenstein is quoted as saying in the Highland Park News. "We are at the forefront of speaking our minds and at the forefront of advocating for our students. We are all being falsely accused by the administration and some colleagues of doing things we have never done, and saying things we have never said."

According to Seidl, among Rubenstein's concern is that "curriculum is mandated. . . . The classroom teacher is no longer trusted or in control of what, when, or how she teaches."

A "teacher" who is pressured to submit to a centralized authority and then become a conveyer belt for a mandated, prefabricated curriculum is no longer really a teacher but is rather mistreated as a cog in somebody's machine.

No wonder this woman revolts. Ellie Rubenstein is created in the image of God and properly exercises critical thinking and a critical distance over against a dehumanzing "educational" machine.

If underneath all the high-sounding verbiage about the adventure of education is the reality that it has become more of a conveyer belt than real learning, why not simply hire monkeys to do the work? They can be trained to push all the correct buttons. And they work for bananas.

Related
Public Schools Turning Teens Into Relativists
Columbus Bishop Risks Jail Defending Catholic School That Fired Homosexual Teacher 

Eric Owens reports at the Daily Caller:

The Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative -- the entity that administers CSCOPE -- announced Monday that it has agreed to cease production of lesson plans for its much-criticized online curriculum system.

Beginning Aug. 31, 2013, school districts in the Lone Star State will no longer be permitted to use any existing CSCOPE lesson plans. CSCOPE itself will be far from dead, however, and other features of curriculum system will continue unchanged. . . .

Critics had persistently protested that the curriculum is riddled with cultural relativism and downright leftist assumptions, particularly in history and social studies.

They pointed to lesson plans informing kids in the state’s public schools that Islam and communism are awesome.
. . . Students also learned that the Boston Tea Party was a terrorist attack, that Christianity is a cult and that a Malthusian population catastrophe is about to overtake the planet.

In another incident, a teacher in Lumberton using a CSCOPE lesson plan allowed three female students to dress up in full-length Islamic burqas and then instructed the entire class that Muslim terrorists are actually freedom fighters.

"Danelle Ivey, a former teacher and now a Texas school board watchdog, called Monday’s announcement a 'very interesting turn of events,' but noted that CSCOPE is by no means going to disappear," Owens reports. 

"The big, obvious question, Ivey told The Daily Caller, is what happens after Aug. 31. She is optimistic that teachers will quickly learn to manage without prefabricated lesson plans," according to Owens.

“Writing a lesson plan is a core competency of being a teacher; it’s not rocket science,” Ivey is quoted as saying. "It wasn’t a burden to be creative or to enrich lessons without the internet. It’s got to be a walk in the park today."

Comment: No properly self-respecting, curious professional teacher, in Texas or in any other state, will allow him or herself to rely on pre-fabricated lesson plans devised by some kind of centralized authority. This smacks of a blob-like, beehive approach to education that disrespects the God-given individuality and creativity of both students and teachers. The pursuit of excellence in education occurs on a higher, more humane plane.

It is crucial to acknowledge that human beings, created in the image of God, are called to think for themselves, to ask questions, and to examine facts and evidence carefully, and then follow that evidence wherever it might lead. Schools, therefore, whether public or private, ought to set people free on the basis of objective, knowable truth, not subject them to any kind of indoctrination, whether political, scientific, or theological (including especially those based on private, non-verifiable "revelations" or supposed "visions from God").

Related
Public Schools Turning Teens Into Relativists 
Texas High School Student Suspended for Saying Homosexuality Is Wrong 

Bob Unruh reports at WND:

An appeal is planned for a family of homeschoolers the Obama administration wants to deport to their home country of Germany to face persecution from education officials there who seek fines and jail for such individuals.

The word comes . . . from officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association [HSLDA], who have been arguing on behalf of the Romeike family since they fled Germany in 2008 and were granted asylum in the U.S. in 2010 by Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman.

"A panel from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently heard arguments on the dispute, and ruled today that the asylum request should be denied."

"We believe the Sixth Circuit is wrong, and we will appeal their decision," WND quotes HSLDA Founder and Chairman Michael Farris as saying. "America has room for this family, and we will do everything we can to help them."

"The court said that the Romeikes had not made a sufficient case, and that the United States has not opened its doors to every victim of unfair treatment," according to WND.

"While the judges admitted the U.S. Constitution recognizes the rights of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children," WND reports, "they refused to concede that the harsh treatment of religiously and philosophically motivated homeschoolers in Germany, including fines, jail and the loss of custody of their children, amounts to persecution within the laws on asylum."

Related
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Kirsten Andersen reports at LifeSiteNews.com:

Columbus Bishop Frederick Campbell has weighed in publicly on the firing of a lesbian teacher from a diocesan high school, telling The Columbus Dispatch that Catholic schools have a "fundamental responsibility" to make sure their teachers uphold the teachings of the faith.

Gym instructor Carla Hale was fired from Bishop Watterson High School last month after an anonymous parent wrote to the Diocese of Columbus to complain that in an obituary for Hale’s mother, Hale was listed as a surviving family member together with her longtime lesbian partner, Julie.

Hale signed a morality clause as part of her contract, affirming that "Catholic school personnel are expected to be examples of moral behavior and professionalism," and acknowledging her employment could be terminated for "immorality" or "serious unethical conduct." Because the Roman Catholic Church holds homosexual behavior to be gravely immoral, the Diocese of Columbus found her to be in violation of her contract, and fired her.

"Hale wants her job back and has filed a grievance with the teachers union, along with a formal complaint with the Columbus Community Relations Commission accusing the school of violating Columbus’s anti-discrimination ordinance," LifeSiteNews reports.

"City law deems it is a misdemeanor for an employer to discriminate against an employee based on sexual preference, or to have policies which do so," and "there is no exemption for religious organizations or other employers who object to homosexuality on religious grounds," according to LifeSiteNews. "A guilty verdict carries penalties of up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. The Community Relations Commission will evaluate Hale’s claim and decide whether to pass it on to the city prosecutor’s office."

Related
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In a "Tale of Two Terrorists," John M. Murtagh recalls at the NYPost:

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

"Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that [now Columbia professor] Kathy Boudin urged the use of 'anti-personnel bombs,'" Murtagh writes. ”In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled."

Murtagh recounts that Boudin "reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process."

According to Murtagh, "survivors of the ambush along the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns. When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns blazing."

Some of today's readers may not be of an age to remember this history. No worries, for "Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices," Murtagh writes.

"Other than the passage of time," Murtagh notes, "one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists."

A certain scrubbing of a certain history may be in order, however. For example, Murtagh directs us to the website of Columbia’s School of Social Work, which "sums up Boudin’s past thus: 'Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.'"

Murtagh concludes: Perhaps "Monday’s bomber can explain that, like Boudin, he was merely working within the community to solve social problems."

Related
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Update: Florida Atlantic University Apologizes for Jesus Stomping 
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Ben Johnson reports at LifeSiteNews.com:

Idealistic young men and women at the University at Buffalo may have dedicated their lives to protecting the unborn, but according to some of their professors, they are similar to Americans "who supported lynching."

Six history professors swiftly condemned the campus chapter of Students For Life after a university-approved display stirred controversy.

The six professors are:

* Susan Cahn, Professor of History
* Carole Emberton, Assistant Professor of History;
* Theresa Runstedtler, Assistant Professor of American Studies;
* Lakisha Simmons, Assistant Professor of Global Gender Studies;
* Victoria Wolcott, Professor of History; and
* Jason Young, Associate Professor of History

"As a student in the history department and president of the pro-life club on campus, not only am I ashamed and appalled that my professors twisted our message to suit their point of view, but I am offended due to their false characterization of our argument," Students for Life chapter President Christian Andzel is quoted as responding. "We were citing the history of oppression and voicelessness of the victims who deserved human rights and justice."

"This is not the kind of example professors from a public university, funded with our tax money, should be setting for our students,” Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins is quoted as saying.

"We stand with UB Students for Life," Hawkins continued, "for courageously fighting to bring the truth of abortion to a liberal campus, despite attempts to shout them down, cover the display, and personally attack group leaders like President Christian Andzel."

Related  
Why Pro-Abortion Is Anti-Science
Extremist Prof Arrested After Profane Tirade at Pro-Life Students 
Professors Admit Discrimination Against Conservatives 

AP reports:

A legislative committee voted unanimously Friday for a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited daily in Oregon public classrooms.

Under state law, schools must give students the opportunity to say the Pledge of Allegiance at least once a week. The bill passed by the House Education Committee would require schools to do so daily, and to have an employee or student lead the recital.

Students can't be compelled to say the pledge, and the bill wouldn't change that.

"Supporters say the pledge is an important part of civic education. Critics say requiring time each day for the pledge would further ostracize students who don't participate because of religious or other reasons," according to AP.

AP is also reporting that "two words in the pledge have sparked controversy: 'under God.'"

According to AP, "Dissenters say they are uncomfortable reciting the Pledge of Allegiance for religious and other reasons. For example, members of the Jehovah's Witnesses denomination typically do not participate in saying the pledge."

Setting aside a moment to recite the Pledge is a step in the right direction.

Another step in the right direction would be to allow a reading from the Declaration of Independence, which states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Every student, teacher, and staff member would benefit from a reminder of what truly is the center of gravity for human rights, human dignity, and human freedom.

Related
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Extremist Barack Obama: Put Nation's 4-Year-Olds in "Public Preschools"

Todd Starnes reports at Fox News:

A federal civil rights complaint has been filed against the Salt Lake City School Board after a principal booted a Cub Scout pack from an elementary school.

About 30 eight to 11 year-olds were told they could no longer meet at Mountain View Elementary School because the Boy Scout’s ban on gay members in leaders conflicted with the school district’s anti-bias policy.

The ban drew the ire of Michael Clara, a school board member and lifetime Boy Scout. Clara filed the federal complaint on behalf of two Latino parents.

"It is an assault on the founding principles of our country for school officials to attempt to exclude a voice no less legitimate than its own from public school participation," Clara is quoted as telling Fox News.

In fact, the pro-family voice of the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts is more legitimate than that of a pro-homosexual school board, for the Scouts ban on homosexuals stands in the mainstream of the family, married life, and the norms of freedom, which are ultimately rooted in the "created equal" of the Creator (see Declaration of Independence) and not in the social constructs of secularized academics, alienated politicians, or an estranged federal state. 

In contrast, the homosexualist movement stands outside of that enduring mainstream and therefore, by definition, occupies the extreme -- against family, against marriage, and even against the human body. It is an ideology that harms.

"A marketplace of ideas devoid of competitive viewpoints engenders an insidious society of conformity, contrary to the fundamental precepts of our Constitution," Clara is also quoted as saying. "It’s unfortunate this principal has the backing of the district to implement their own form of discrimination and racism."

By the way, Clara "describes himself as a Christian conservative Republican who supports gay rights," according to Fox News. It should be noted that a belief in "gay rights" faces a huge challenge intellectually insofar as it operates on the basis of a relativistic social construct, which undercuts the very concept of morality and of rights and offers no sound basis for "unalienable rights."

The slogan "homosexual rights" is actually an assertion of raw power, organized anarchy, and it possesses all the authenticity of a $3 bill. Anything you can buy with this counterfeit will be of no value. Fortunately for human freedom, all the yelling, screaming, hating, and name-calling in the world -- as well as removing from schools -- cannot change this fact.

Meanwhile, the name of the principal of Mountain View Elementary School is James Martin. He can be contacted by email at james.martin@slcschools.org, according the school's public website.

These are your schools, parents. These are your schools, taxpayers. The principals work for you, the school board works for you. You pay their salaries. Ultimately, in community with the God who liberates, you are the boss and you call the shots. It's time for Wisdom to rise up. It's time for Wisdom to rise up.

Related
The Revolt of Intelligence Against "Marriage Equality"
Son of Lesbian in Paris: Meet the "Gay" Police State
Memo to Conservatives: Accepting Homosex "Marriage" Opens Door to "Unlimited Statism"
Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat

Kristine Marsh writes at CNSNews.com:

An Iowa anti-bullying conference is planning to teach students and adults how "to fight back against propaganda from the extreme right wing, from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to Bob Vander Plaats and Jan Mickelson."

The event is being put on by Iowa Safe Schools, a gay advocacy group affiliated with the Iowa Civil Rights Commission. This is its eighth annual Iowa Governor's Conference on LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning) Youth, and taxpayers and students are sponsoring it, at least in part.

The conference, that takes place April 3, will feature anti-conservative and anti-Christian workshops.

"A documentary entitled For the Bible Tells Me So will be shown, along with a discussion afterwards," CNSNews reports. "The event description asks, 'Is the Bible an excuse to hate?' Another event describes how religion is a 'form of oppression' alongside racism, sexism, and homophobia."

This extreme homosexualist approach smacks of rank propaganda that discriminates against the Creator and his liberating norms for marriage, human sexuality, and unalienable rights (as opposed to pretend rights socially constructed in San Fransciso thought ghettos).

Free minds, of course, revolt and refuse to submit to organized bullying and to organized hatreds, especially when those hatreds try to hide their intent behind slogans such as "safe schools" and other deceptions designed not to inform but to conquer. 

Stand up, Iowa. Stand up to your oppressors. In love and in truth, yes, but stand. Hate must be resisted, and lies knocked down by truth. Live free. Live free.  

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Son of Lesbian in Paris: Meet the "Gay" Police State 
Nordstrum Decides to Stomp on Marriage
Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat

Eric Owens writes at The Daily Caller:

The story about the Florida Atlantic University [FAU] student who says he ended up suspended because he refused to stomp on a piece of paper bearing the word “JESUS” has really taken off nationally. . . .

Junior Ryan Rotela, a devout Mormon, says he was booted from class after he told an FAU school official that the Jesus-stomping assignment made him uncomfortable.

An FAU official initially defended the suspension, telling local CBS affiliate WPEC that the Jesus-stomping was part of a classroom exercise from a textbook, Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach, 5th Edition.

On Friday, reports Todd Starnes of Fox News, FAU issued an apology for [Deandre] Poole’s assignment. The public, taxpayer-funded school said it won’t be using the assignment again.

"We sincerely apologize for any offense this has caused,” the apology says, according to The Daily Caller. "Florida Atlantic University respects all religions and welcomes people of all faiths, backgrounds and beliefs."

Related
Democrat Official Makes Students "Stomp on Jesus" ... "Secular Disciples of 'Diversity' and 'Tolerance'" 
Professors Admit Discrimination Against Conservatives

Join best-selling author and professor Nancy Pearcey for a "full year (two semesters) of intensive study in worldview apologetics to ground students in the knowledge and skills needed to think critically about secular worldviews and apply a liberating Christian perspective in their studies, their professions, and across the whole of life," announces the Francis Schaeffer Center for Worldview and Culture at Houston Baptist University.

Out of the Box, Into the World: In the Fall 2013, students can take "Worldview Apologetics: 'Testing Everything' with C.S. Lewis & Francis Schaeffer."

Hello Campus, Good-Bye God: In the Spring 2014, students can take "Worldview Apologetics: Surviving and Thriving at the University."

For contact information and course descriptions, read the Francis Schaeffer Center announcement here.

Benjamin Chance writes at Breitbart.com:

Is it "fair" that illegal immigrants and foreign exchange students are allowed to play high school football on Friday nights and to participate in extra curricular activities at public schools, while many of their peers, who are legal US citizens but who happen to be homeschooled, are being denied "equal" access to the same opportunities in their local communities?

In Virginia last week, seven Democrats and a lone Republican, perhaps unaware or unmoved by such a discrepancy, made the point moot and rejected the so called "Tebow Bill" that sought to "level the playing field."

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Obamacare Mentality vs. Homeschool Freedom 
Black French Soccer Star Shocked by Lack of U.S. Racism

Daniel Greenfield writes at Frontpagemag.com:

Colorado Springs University legalized the right to carry concealed firearms on campus in 2003. Since then, according to Students for Concealed Carry, the number of forcible and non-forcible sexual assaults dropped sharply, falling 90 percent from a high in 2002 to a new low in 2008.

While Colorado Democrat Joe Salazar suggested that women could not be trusted to carry guns on campus because they might not know when they’re being raped, a young woman who was raped on campus because she was not allowed to carry a firearm, despite having a permit, has said otherwise.

Greenfield concludes: "They say that an armed society is a polite society. It may also be a rape-free society so long as the right to bear arms isn’t limited to just cops and criminals."

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Texas Town Lets Teachers Carry Guns

Joe Schoffstall writes at CNSNews.com:

Recently, Revealing Politics released a video of Colorado Rep. Joe Salazar arguing that college women don't need guns to prevent rape because they can use whistles, "safe zones," and call boxes instead. His theory behind this was that just because women feel they're going to be raped, doesn't mean it's actually going to happen.

On Wednesday, NRA News Radio Host Cam Edwards interviewed Amanda Collins, a woman who was raped at the University of Nevada at gun point in a gun free zone. The brave woman responds to the comments made by Rep. Joe Salazar.

During the radio interview, Collins warned about a "false sense of security." She said the University of Nevada, Reno, "didn't have any call boxes the night that I was attacked. They afterwards they installed them. But I can tell you that a call box above my head while I was straddled on the parking garage floor being brutally raped wouldn't have helped me one bit. The safe zones? Well I was in a safe zone and my attacker didn't care."

Listen to the interview here.

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College Lets Transgender Man Expose Himself to Young Girls 
College Prof Compares Cross to Swastika

Kirsten Andersen reports at LifeSiteNews.com:

Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester has issued orders to the state’s K-12 public schools requiring them to permit "transgender" boys and girls to use the opposite sex’s locker rooms, bathrooms, and changing facilities as long as they claim to identify with that gender.

Many elementary schools in smaller Massachusetts towns include children from kindergarten through eighth grade, making it possible for boys as old as 14 to share toilet facilities with girls as young as five.

"Under Chester's leadership, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) released an 11-page document on Friday outlining this and other new guidelines giving 'transgender' students special status and privileges in Massachusetts schools," reports LifeSiteNews.

"The policy does not require a doctor’s note or even parental permission for a child to switch sexes in the eyes of Massachusetts schools," LifeSiteNews also reports. "Only the student’s word is needed: If a boy says he’s a girl, as far as the schools are concerned, he’s a girl."

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Todd Starnes reports at Fox News:

A North Carolina congressman is denouncing the use of federal dollars to “promote the rich cultural heritage of Islamic civilizations.”

Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) told Fox News that he was appalled by the hundreds of thousands of dollars used to fund the program through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant -- calling it “wasting taxpayer money.”

Jones was referring to the “Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys” program. The NEH program put dozens of books promoting the Islamic culture in more than 800 libraries in all 50 states. The program is funded by a $1.8 million grant. . . .

Craven Community College, in Jones’ district, was one of the institutions to receive the NEH grant.

Jerry Schill, chairman of the local Craven-Pamlico Christian Coalition, said, “In light of the government’s role in keeping God out of the public square and the obstacles that Christians face when it comes to prayer and the ability to publicly proclaim our faith, it just seems more than odd that the federal government will provide a package of ‘Muslim Journeys’ to a number of colleges nationwide.” 

Related
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From the Washington Times:

School districts in Texas are using tracking chips to spy on students. That’s just fine with a federal judge who ruled Tuesday against Andrea Hernandez, a 15-year-old high school sophomore in San Antonio.

With the help of the Rutherford Institute, Miss Hernandez and her father filed a lawsuit arguing the creepy “student locator project” violated her constitutional rights.

"Like a growing number of institutions around the country, Northside Independent School District forces students to wear photo identification cards around their necks at all times," notes the Times. "Cameras also watch the every move of pupils as they roam the halls and use the playgrounds."

There's more. "The high school Miss Hernandez attends took the logical next step by requiring students to carry 'Smart IDs' with radio frequency identification chips (RFID) that enable administrators to pinpoint each child’s whereabouts in real time," the Times continues.

What's at stake? The Times reports that, "according to court documents, school officials implemented the program 'to further increase the safety of its students and hopefully increase State funding.'" 

Safety? "Having school administrators monitor students at all hours won’t make them any safer,"  the Times counters. "In fact, it was a school board member who took the lives of 38 elementary students in Bath Township, Mich. in a horrific mass murder 86 years ago."

The Times suggests a truer motivation: "That state and federal officials love to blow taxpayer cash on gimmicks pushed by lobbyists regardless of whether they enhance learning. In this case, the school district hoped to pocket $1.7 million in state funding by embracing Big Brother."

It's an intriguing phenomenon: The increasingly secularized public school system has no room for the Creator -- who happens to be the source of unalienable human rights (see the Declaration) -- but welcomes with open arms the intimate impositions of Big Brother.

This steamrolling intimacy is an attack on the individual and the uniqueness and freedom of the person. Andrea Hernandez and family are humans and therefore are right to resist.

They are endowed by a knowable and verifiable Creator "with certain unalienable Rights," and among these rights are "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In contrast, when Big Brother spies on you, no one is safe -- most of all, from Big Brother. But when the individual is the apple of the Creator's eye, all are set free. 

In a broken world, this will not lead to perfection. But it will lead away from the "safety" of spying and micro-control wherein schools resemble education camps that honor submission over minds that are free. 

Maybe this is what, in the end, really concerns Big Brother and his demanding disciples: The person properly in revolt exposes the idolatry and mental barbed wire of Big Brother, and that terrifies him.

The neighbors might see. They might remember who they are. That could ruin everything.

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Public Schools Turning Teens Into Relativists 
Study: Public Schools Teachers Not Underpaid

John Coleman explains:

Reading and writing poetry . . . develops creativity. [Poet] Dana Gioia says, "As [I rose] in business . . . I felt I had an enormous advantage over my colleagues because I had a background in imagination, in language and in literature."

Noting that the Greek root for poetry means "maker," Dana emphasizes that senior executives need not just quantitative skills but "qualitative and creative" skills and "creative judgment," and feels reading and writing poetry is a route to developing those capabilities.

Indeed, poetry may be an even better tool for developing creativity than conventional fiction.

Clare Morgan, in her book What Poetry Brings to Business, cites a study showing that poems caused readers to generate nearly twice as many alternative meanings as "stories," and poetry readers further developed greater "self-monitoring" strategies that enhanced the efficacy of their thinking processes.

These creative capabilities can help executives keep their organizations entrepreneurial, draw imaginative solutions, and navigate disruptive environments where data alone are insufficient to make progress.

When I was in college, English majors could take poetry, drama, or novels
-- but my advisor said the smartest students always came out of the poetry course. The intensity of interpretation that poetry requires seems to train the brain . . . So of course, I signed up! It turned out to be my favorite course in college.

Heather Sells reports at CBN News:

In tiny Wichita Falls, Texas, the Harrold Independent School District allows teachers with concealed handgun licenses to carry guns in the classroom.

The policy dates back to 2007. Harrold ISD Superintendent David Thweatt said he believes it has and will prevent a school shooting.

"My goal is that if someone comes in and tries to hurt my little ones that they are killed," Thweatt said.

One student said, "I like it because it kind of makes me feel safer because it's Harrold -- we don't have a police station here."

Nancy and I can now gladly, with thanks, announce today the formation of the Francis Schaeffer Center for Worldview and Culture, located on the campus of Houston Baptist University. 

This is a developing story. More information will follow.

At Houston Baptist University. Updated website, etc., to follow.

I'm very honored to be able to accept this academic appointment!

Here's my current "About" page at The Pearcey Report. This page, too, will be updated.

Daren Jonescu writes at American Thinker:

If Barack and Michelle Obama feel comfortable allowing Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to babysit their children, that is their problem. The question is, would you allow them to babysit yours?

Let's take that a step farther: Would you let them raise your children?

Would you give them exclusive supervision over the majority of your children's daylight hours up to age eighteen, primary control of your children's academic curriculum and teaching methodology, and authority to arrange the broad social and moral framework within which your children will be educated?

No? Then why do you accept modern public education?

Furthermore, why, after having delivered generations of children into this Marx/Dewey/Marcuse/Ayers educational program, is anyone perplexed at people's inability to respect individual freedom, understand property rights, or hold themselves to standards of character and reasoning higher than that of a mugger?

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Let's see, thinking in the longterm, the Western world wants sex, sex, sex, brought to you by respected universities of diversity, such as Harvard.

Meanwhile, Muslims are willing to die to take over the Western world. And they think Allah is on their side.

While Harvard students are just happy to be side by side.

Who could possibly come out the victor in that struggle?

The continued radical indoctrination of kids will mean "Goodbye to the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave," writes Gary Aminoff at American Thinker.

Oh, it was Romney getting assaulted. Clearly, not a news story. 

Besides, Obama has already said voting was the "best way" to get revenge.

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Charlie Butts reports at OneNewsNow:

Dallas' Criswell College has filed suit against the ObamaCare HHS mandate to provide free coverage in insurance exchanges for abortion-inducing drugs.

"We're currently renegotiating new health insurance, which is something we do on an annual basis here at Criswell," says Jerry Johnson, president of Criswell College.

"This new mandate is going to require us to violate our religious beliefs, because it would force us to fund something that's contrary to the biblical values we stand for, particularly the sanctity of innocent human life."

Obamacare is in fact on the wrong side of the Constitution, the Declaration, the facts of science, humane ethical norms, and the verifiable information we have from the Creator.

In addition, it is impossible to "love thy neighbor" and care for "the least of these" and at the same time embrace a philosophy of governance that allows one class of persons to oppress, up to the point of death, another class of persons.

And stewardship in community with God and man requires that people of conscience are not forced to fund barbarism with a secular, liberal face.

Bravo, Criswell College, for refusing to bend the knee to inhumanity posing as liberation.

Related
College Lets Transgender Man Expose Himself to Young Girls
Public Schools Turning Teens Into Relativists
Messiah Prof Defends "Explicitly Christian" Obama

Todd Starnes reports at Fox News:

A Washington college said their non-discrimination policy prevents them from stopping a transgender man from exposing himself to young girls inside a women’s locker room, according to a group of concerned parents.

“Little girls should not be exposed to naked men, period,” said David Hacker, senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom. A group of concerned parents contacted the legal firm for help.

Hacker said a 45-year-old male student, who dresses as a woman and goes by the name Colleen Francis, undressed and exposed his genitals on several occasions inside the women's locker room at Evergreen State College.

Is Evergreen State College, and its "non-discrimination policy," so alienated from the rules for freedom and human dignity (see, for example, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution) that it cannot tell the difference between diversity and perversity?

Let me offer a free-thinker's thought for campus life: Any "diversity" that disrespects the unalienable and Creator-endowed difference (authentic diversity!) between male and female is not a strength, it's a weakness. And it's a weakness that puts people at risk.

And by the way, sexual disorientation is not an unalienable right, even if it's "policy." And by the way, a 45-year-old male who hasn't figured out he's a man needs help, not an open door to the girls' dressing room. 

It may be that Evergreen State College needs a course in Commonsense 101.

And it may be that, if Evergreen State College really cannot tell the difference between nondiscrimination and nonsense -- between moral right and moral wrong and how these liberating norms apply to the diversity of male and female opposites (viva la difference!) -- then maybe it has no business being in the education business. 

In such a case, Evergreen may be harming, not educating. And ever-gullible, not ever-good.

What is study at Evergreen State all about these days? Education? Or is something else on the agenda?

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Attorney and columnist Matt Barber writes:

My dear friend and colleague Dr. Judith Reisman, a visiting law professor at Liberty University School of Law, recently guest lectured during “Sexual Behavior and the Law,” a course I teach. Dr. Reisman’s lecture was filmed by CSPAN and will be airing soon.

In past years, Dr. Reisman has served as scientific consultant to four U.S. Department of Justice administrations, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). She is a world renowned expert on the discredited research of bug doctor turned “sexologist,” Alfred Kinsey.

Kinsey, though married to a woman who took part in his many filmed “scientific” orgies, was a promiscuous homosexual and sadomasochist. He managed to completely upend and twist the world’s perception of human sexuality in the 1950s and ’60s with his world famous “Kinsey Reports.”

Even today, most are completely unaware that during his tenure at Indiana University, Kinsey facilitated, with stopwatches and ledgers, the systematic sexual abuse of hundreds, if not thousands, of children and infants -- all in the name of science.

Among other things, Kinsey asserted that children are "sexual from birth." He further concluded, based upon experiments he directed and documented in his infamous Table 34, that adult-child sex is harmless, even beneficial, and described child “orgasm” as “culminating in extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting. . . ." Many children suffered “excruciating pain,” he observed, “and [would] scream if movement [was] continued.” Some “[would] fight away from the [adult] partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive[d] definite pleasure from the situation.”

Yeah. Sounds like it.

It’s little wonder that Dr. Reisman identifies Kinsey as a “sexual psychopath.” These children were as young as 2 months old.

Disturbing though that may be, what’s equally disturbing is that nearly all of today’s liberal “comprehensive sex education” curricula -- such as that pushed by groups like the National Education Association (NEA), Planned Parenthood and the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Education Network (GLSEN) -- is derived entirely from the criminally fraudulent research of Alfred Kinsey.

But even more troubling is a recent discovery by Dr. Reisman. She found that the Obama administration, which fully embraces the debunked Kinsey sex-education model, has begun pushing a curriculum that, in many ways, eerily mirrors the “FBI Molester Grooming Paradigm.”

In short, she found that both Obama’s HHS and many public sex-education programs are doing to children, constructively, what pedophiles do to “groom” them for sex. . . .

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The UK Daily Mail reports:

A Michigan sophomore beamed last night as she faced the bullies who voted her to the homecoming court as a sick joke.

After initially planning to skip the celebrations, Whitney Kropp, 16, bravely walked out onto the field during Ogemaw Heights High School's homecoming football game to accept the honour, and more than 1,000 people showed up to support her.

"The kids that are bullying you, do not let them bring you down. Stand up for what you believe in and go with your heart and go with your gut," Whitney said, shortly after the halftime celebration.

Scott Lively writes at WND:

LGBT History Month is not yet universally adopted by public schools. Nevertheless, throughout October tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent school children will be subjected to the most despicable brainwashing ever conducted in American classrooms. They will be taught, through carefully constructed lesson plans, to view homosexuals as a superior class of human beings whose influence on society has been wholly benign, but whose contributions to society have been limited due to irrational prejudice and bigotry. They will learn the importance of protecting homosexuals from societal “homophobia,” perhaps even emanating from their own parents, and that homosexuality is a perfectly normal and healthy (and unchangeable) form of sexual identity. In other words, they will be indoctrinated in provably false and thoroughly biased pro-”gay” propaganda.

After documenting the unsavory origins and twisted direction of "gay" power extremism, Lively concludes:

The “gay rights” movement is not benign. Its history is a poisoned stream whose headwaters begin in the swamp of Sadean perversion and whose direction was set by the same people who created the Nazi Party. In America its course has run mostly through underground sewers until the past few decades when control of the movement fell into the hands of modern marketing experts who have hidden the truth under a white-washed facade of their own shrewd design. And it is this sugar-sweetened poison that is about to be spoon-fed to America’s public school students. It is a “gay” Kool-Aid of dangerous lies and it is to our great shame that this once-Christian nation will allow these innocent children to consume it without so much as a whimper of protest.

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CBN News reports:

In the wake of the teacher's strike in Chicago, churches across the metropolis are stepping up to help the city's children.

Many are opening their doors to help feed kids who would normally eat their meals at school.

Attorney and columnist Matt Barber writes:

Woe to any scientist with an interest in objectively researching and reporting on “LGBT”-related issues. If your findings fail the left’s socio-political “butterflies-and-rainbows” litmus test, the “progressive” establishment will try to destroy you -- guaranteed. Thus, on these matters, honest scientific inquiry will require courage.

Kansas State University, July 2010: Family Studies professor Dr. Walter Schumm releases the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of homosexual “parenting.” Published in the Journal of Biosocial Science, the study determined, among other things:

Children raised in “gay” households are up to 12 times more likely to self-identify as “gay”;

Of those in their 20s -- presumably after they’d been able to work out any adolescent confusion or experimentation -- 58% of the children of lesbians called themselves “gay,” and 33% of the children of “gay” men called themselves “gay.” (Contrast these rates with current studies indicating that around 3% of the general population is homosexual.)

Just before the research was released, AOL News reported, “Schumm says it shouldn’t have taken until 2010 to do the meta-analysis. Too often his colleagues impose ‘liberal or progressive political interpretations’ on their studies, which inhibit further inquiry. ‘It’s kind of sad,’” he said.

Sad, yes, but it’s also by design. “I just want to know the truth about something,” he confessed. Unfortunately, there are many with an extreme socio-political agenda who depend entirely upon suppressing the truth.

“As if expecting a political backlash himself,” reported AOL, “Schumm concludes his study with a quote from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. ‘All truth passes through three stages: First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.’”

Indeed, left-wing backlash was both swift and fierce. Schumm was instantly decried as a “quack,” a “conservative plant” and a“fraud.” Over the past two years, both Schumm and his study have passed through all three of Schopenhauer’s fiery stages, only to emerge unsinged.

But the damage to honest inquiry was already done. The message to anyone else who might conduct such a study was clear: If you dare release research on homosexuality and we don’t like your findings, we’re coming for you.

Not everyone got the message.

University of Texas-Austin, June 2012: Dr. Mark Regnerus leads a team of researchers on another peer-reviewed homosexual “parenting” study labeled: "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relations? Findings from the New Family Structures Study."

The study was published in the journal Social Science Research. Its website FAQ page summarizes the findings: “The data show rather clearly that children raised by gay or lesbian parents on average are at a significant disadvantage when compared to children raised by the intact family of their married, biological mother and father.”

Focus on the Family’s Citizenlink distills the research: “According to [Regnerus'] findings, children raised by homosexual parents are more likely than those raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from poor impulse control, depression and suicidal thoughts, require mental health therapy; identify themselves as homosexual; choose cohabitation; be unfaithful to partners; contract sexually transmitted diseases; be sexually molested; have lower income levels; drink to get drunk; and smoke tobacco and marijuana.”

Again, you could’ve set your watch to the liberal response. They went ballistic.

Notorious homosexual activist Scott Rosenweig (aka, Scott Rose. Warning: link to Rosenweig’s extremist history is profane and offensive) filed a formal complaint, demanding that the University of Texas both investigate and, ultimately, fire Dr. Regnerus for his findings.

A gaggle of homosexualist academics and liberal activists pounced, bewailing the study as “homophobic” and “methodologically flawed.” Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, conducted an “audit” of the already peer-reviewed study and arrived at the unassailable, scholarly and poignantly worded conclusion: “It’s bulls--t.”

Except that it wasn’t.

On Wednesday, the University of Texas -- no bastion of conservatism -- released a highly anticipated report on its findings,  summarily dismissing Rosenweig, Sherkat, and the dozens of “progressive” critics who couldn’t stomach the study’s game-changing implications. This painstaking inquiry was spearheaded by an independent consultant who formerly ran the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Noted UT-Austin: “As with much university research, Regnerus’ New Family Structures Study touches on a controversial and highly personal issue that is currently being debated by society at large. The university expects the scholarly community will continue to evaluate and report on the findings of the Regnerus article and supports such discussion.”

Still, observed the report, the research was properly conducted and “no formal investigation is warranted into the allegations of scientific misconduct lodged against associate professor Mark Regnerus.”

Experience of the millennia, indeed child-like common sense, frequently informs reality. Children are best served -- vastly so -- when raised by a mother and father.

Although there are sometimes unavoidable circumstances that short-circuit the mom-dad gold standard (single parenthood, etc.), this undeniable truth, to borrow from Schopenhauer, has, heretofore, been “accepted as being self-evident.”

So why on earth would we intentionally and selfishly sabotage it?

While we don’t necessarily need studies to reaffirm that which is so obvious, it is helpful to find a fast-growing body of research available to refute the “new-normal-modern-family” propaganda that sits tendentiously atop today’s moral-relativist house of cards.

Still, those who seek to deconstruct legitimate marriage and the natural family will always endeavor to suppress honest inquiry. They must.

Even so, whether liberal or conservative, “gay” or straight, the scientific community should be allowed to pursue truth in an environment that holds objective scientific inquiry sacrosanct. They should be free to follow the evidence wheresoever it may lead, even when such ends prove unfashionable.

But alas, the lie shall forevermore seek to imprison truth. So it was in a world once flat; and so it remains in a world with throwaway parents.

But take heart. In the end, truth does prevail. For it is the promise of Truth Himself: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:30-32)

Matt Barber serves as vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.

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Matthew Hennessey writes at First Things:

“It’s a free country” may not continue to resonate with Americans for much longer . . . . 

As Obamacare’s individual mandate was predicated on the notion that costs incurred by an individual but borne by society necessitate government intervention, politicians in this country could easily be convinced -- by, say, teachers unions -- that homeschoolers are no different than the uninsured in the costs they impose on the rest of us.

Doesn’t society suffer if kids aren’t being properly socialized? Don’t institutions suffer if children aren’t being properly educated into citizenship? . . .

The progressive critics of homeschooling are less interested in promoting tolerance than they are in promoting compliance. It’s the freedom that bothers them, not what kids learn or how well they learn it. . . .

If the state appoints itself to guard against indoctrination by parents, who is to protect children from indoctrination by the state?

Hennessey concludes: "A government that can force you to buy health insurance can surely force children into the public school system. When that happens, will we still be a free country?"

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A high school philosophy teacher opens an ethics class by displaying an unsettling photo of Bibi Aisha, an "Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban ��?ghter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains."

Bob Kellogg reports at OneNewsNow:

A Christian college is seeking emergency relief to halt the Health and Human Services mandate requiring the school to cover the cost of abortion-inducing drugs in its health plan.

On January 1, Wheaton College will have to begin offering abortifacients as part of the employee health insurance. Since abortion is against the school's religious beliefs, Kyle Duncan of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty reports that officials are asking the court for a preliminary injunction.

"We've asked for an expedited hearing in that case in early September, and we are waiting to hear word from the court on how it's going to proceed," Duncan details.

Wheaton College should not, of course, be forced by the federal government to fund any kind of inhumanity, including abortion inhumanity.

The mainstream humane position, freedom position, Christian position, factual position, and American position all stand squarely and centrally on the side of life. Even the life of "the least of these" who are not politically connected or ideologically useful.

Instead, we are witnessing a force-fed extremism that alienates human beings from our enduring calling to live in liberating community with God and man.

Federal authoritarianism -- whether sought by Obama or enabled by Republicans -- is rightfully exposed, rejected, and replaced for the gross inhumanity for which it stands.

Rather than the federal government seeking to impose the private values of inhumane and secularized elites, the American people ought to impose upon the federal government norms and practices consistent with the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Creator who is the center of gravity of human freedom.

Emily Esfahani Smith reports at the Washington Times: 

It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.

But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”

Why is HBU among the top 10? Because it's a "School with Vision and Intellectual Horsepower," according to thebestschools.org. Here's more:

Previously unknown beyond Texas, Houston Baptist University has vaulted onto the map with its “10 Pillars” initiative, which includes such homeschool-friendly goals as Build on the Classics, Bring Athens and Jerusalem Together [integrate philosophy and Christianity], Increase Cultural Impact, Expand on the Creative Arts, Create a Strong Global Focus, and more.

To fill out this goal, HBU has had a major hiring surge, taking on acclaimed Christian scholars John Mark Reynolds, Michael Licona, Nancy Pearcey, Bruce Gordon, Richard Martinez, Louis Markos, Mary Joe Sharp, and Holly Ordway. Also added is the department of apologetics, to work in tandem with the philosophy department.

The ambitious 10 Pillars program is the brainchild of its president Robert Sloan. Formerly the president of Baylor University, Sloan attempted a similar 10 Pillars program years earlier at Baylor, only to find that when he began shaking things up, the establishment was too far removed from its Baptist roots, too entrenched in evolutionary science, and too intolerant of the various applications of apologetics to endure the Christian vision.

From Emily Reilly at Investor's Businesss Daily:

You've heard the stories, and maybe you know someone who has dipped his or her toes into the cesspool of campus liberalism. But you don't believe that campuses are as liberal as they say.

Well, you can believe the hype. They are.

The campus atmosphere, professors and many students are just as liberal, tree-hugging and socialism-loving as a conservative might imagine.

How do I know? I have lived the nightmare for three years at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

Kathleen Gilbert reports at LifeSiteNews:

A conservative legal group is demanding that a New York City school officials and Mayor Michael Bloomberg reverse a decision banning “God Bless the USA” at a kindergarten graduation ceremony, because they deemed it potentially offensive to other cultures.

Pat Buchanan writes:

Ronald Reagan’s firing of the striking air traffic controllers, whose union had been among the few to endorse him, marked him as a leader willing to act against a powerful union if the public interest commands it.

Gov. Scott Walker is now in that tradition. He has just routed a recall campaign that began with state senators disgracefully fleeing to Illinois rather than provide a quorum, and mobs occupying his capitol.

Bruce Bawer writes at Frontpage.com:

There's the academy, and then there's the real world.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is the academy's weekly newspaper of record, has long seemed interested in keeping, if not one foot in the real world, then at least a toe or two in the real world, publishing articles that are written in lively, non-academic prose and even, from time to time, in the name of intellectual diversity, running pieces that take a less than entirely reverential view of higher education's left-wing orthodoxies.

It's a delicate balance -- how much heresy can you allow into the tabernacle without outraging the faithful?

Answer? "Any hint of dissent is verboten."  

Walter Williams writes:

The Philadelphia Inquirer's big story Feb. 4 was about how a budget crunch at the Philadelphia School District had caused the district to lay off 91 school police officers. Over the years, there's been no discussion of what has happened to our youth that makes a school police force necessary in the first place.

The Inquirer's series "Assault on Learning" (March 2011) reported that in the 2010 school year, "690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were." The newspaper reported that in Philadelphia's 268 schools, "on an average day 25 students, teachers, or other staff members were beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes. That doesn't even include thousands more who are extorted, threatened, or bullied in a school year."

No, this is not a news report about government control of education.

Lauren Chooljian reports at The Daily Caller:

Despite Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s consistent calls for increased teacher salaries, a new study says that most public school teachers aren’t actually being underpaid.

The new research from The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute suggests a majority of public school teachers are making more than they likely would in the private sector.

And so are all those Western bodies with heads still attached. Meanwhile, at FoxNation, this:

The Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights confirmed that it is investigating allegations that Catholic University violated the human rights of Muslim students by not allowing them to form a Muslim student group and by not providing them rooms without Christian symbols for their daily prayers.

The investigation alleges that Muslim students “must perform their prayers surrounded by symbols of Catholicism -- e.g., a wooden crucifix, paintings of Jesus, pictures of priests and theologians which many Muslim students find inappropriate.”

Rivendell Sanctuary, where Nancy and I are on the faculty, is featured in an overview article titled "Christian Have College Choices," published at OneNewsNow.

OneNewsNow is a division of the American Family Association. 

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If parents and financial supporters of Messiah College get wind of this, there may be Heaven to pay:

On the surface it may seem odd that a self-professed Christian school would be hostile to the presentation of conservative ideas, but that’s nothing unusual for Messiah.

Students and alum tell us that teachers there preach “social justice” (read: socialism) as though it were gospel, which is why when the president of the College Republicans told us on Saturday evening that [Prof. James] LaGrand wanted their forum canceled, we believed him. 

Tomorrow in our Theology class at Rivendell Sanctuary we shall have a Socratic circle that discusses "Why I Am Not a Christian," a lecture by famed atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell.

In stark contrast to the cults of politics, "faith," and "settled science" so evident on today's campus, in Hollywood, around politics, and in the formerly mainstream media, free-thinkers who embrace the Judeo-Christian worldview because it is empirically verifiable, logically consistent, answers the basic philosophic questions, and is existentially viable relish the opportunity to test various truth-claims in the marketplace of ideas.

Some may prefer to cling to their false ideolgies, inhumane politics, materialistic economics, and family-destroying social agendas. Others would rather seek truth. And then on the basis of what is discovered, help build a better world. 

And so tomorrow we shall ask ourselves and Bertrand Russell a few honest questions. It's called the free exhange of ideas. You may recall that, once upon a time in America, a lot of colleges did that.

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Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

Kathleen Gilbert reports at LifeSiteNews:

The Texas school where a teen was punished for saying homosexuality was wrong has apologized and stated the boy “has the right to express an opinion in a manner consistent with law and policy.”

The Fort Worth Independent School District has issued a letter fully vindicating high school freshman Dakota Ary, who was given in-school suspension for telling another student that he believes homosexuality is wrong because of his Christian faith.

The school should also apologize for hatefully discriminating against the Creator and his verifiable norms for human sexuality and healthy families.

Bravo to student Dakota Ary and Liberty Council for standing up to the homosexual propaganda machine. 

Former Minnesota governor Al Quie visited our class at Rivendell Sanctuary last Wednesday, September 20. His granddaughter Savannah Quie is one of our students. 

Mr. Quie held office from 1979 to 1983, and when Savannah introduced him to the class, she was beaming as she described him as a man of great integrity.

He told us that he bought several copies of Nancy's book Total Truth and gave it to members of his family.

We were also joined in class Thursday and Friday by Katrina and Michelle Brittain, who are respectively the sister and mother of Justin Brittain.

Several of us enjoyed discussion over lunch with Katrina and Mrs. Brittain, and last night they jumped right in to a refreshing time of volleyball in the gym.

Whether from local Minneapolis environs (Al Quie) or flying in from the Southwest (Katrina and Michelle Brittain, New Mexico), Nancy and I think it's terrific that family members of our students take such an interest in their education, which occurs on so many levels, at Rivendell Sanctuary. 

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Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

AP reports:

The annual "See You at the Pole" event is scheduled for Wednesday at schools across the nation -- and while students are the main focus, one national organizer says parents should be involved. . . .

The event, which takes place every year on the fourth Wednesday in September, annually draws somewhere between one and two million students, all of them gathering around the school's flagpole to pray for the nation, for each other, and for their school.

Christine Dhanagom reports at LifeSiteNews:

A Catholic University in Pennsylvania has cancelled a scheduled appearance by prominent feminist journalist Ellen Goodman after the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS) drew attention to the conflict between Goodman’s work and Catholic Church teaching on key issues.

The Catholic watchdog group reported in a blog entry that Goodman was scheduled to speak October 12th at St. Francis University in Loretto on the topic of civility in public discourse. The lecture was part of the school’s annual Furlong Lecture Series.

The blog entry detailed the history of Goodman’s outspoken support for abortion, including opposing conscience rights for pharmacists who choose not to dispense abortifacient “emergency” birth control.

Kathleen Gilbert reports at LifeSiteNews:

A Christian high school student was punished by his school this week for saying he believes “being a homosexual is wrong.”

Dakota Ary, 14, says his statement was part of a one-on-one conversation about religions in Germany with a friend sitting behind him during a language class, according to a local Fox News report.

“I guess [the teacher] heard me. He started yelling,” said Ary. “He told me he was going to write me an infraction and send me to the office.”

In case you didn't know, there now exists something called The Centre for Unintelligent Design.

Apparently, some 88 seconds ago, or several thousands of seconds ago, or millions or billions of seconds ago, the Centre for Unintelligent Design did not exist. And then, on the 89th second (or other such temporal numerical value), some aspect of time, space, and matter burped, and Lo & Behold, into being came the Centre for Unintelligent Design.

This contingent universe being what it is (or is not), you had better read all about this newish (or is it oldish, or do the words "new" or "old" -- without or without "ish" -- have meaning in a contingent universe?) website as soon as possible.

With each click of the tick-tock the Centre for Unintelligent Design may well uncreate itself back into the meaningless self-caused (or non-self-caused) nonexistence from which it emerged, lived, breathed, and for a while expressed its arbitrary being in a universe that couldn't care less.

One last thing: Did the website for The Centre of Unintelligent Design have a website designer? Just wondering.

Meanwhile, that's it folks. Now go watch some soccer.

David Cortman of the Alliance Defense Fund writes:

At different locales around the country, in places as diverse as Detroit, Mich., Lawrenceville, Ga., and Camdenton, Mo., the ACLU is sending letters and filing lawsuits seeking to disallow government school usage of certain Internet filters.

They claim their campaign is designed to end the blocking of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender” activist group sites, but in reality it will allow school children to access to pornographic websites.

It's a straightforward principle, Moms and Dads: Don't allow ACLU bullies and their minions to impose inside schools what you would not allow outside of them. 

This is your country, is it not? You -- and not the state -- are the proper God-given stewards of the education of your children are you not?

Therefore: Resist, fight, protect, and overcome. 

Kick these well-heeled merchants of slime out. Get them out of the lives of your kids and keep their dirty paws off our laws. Reclaim your future, your children's future, and your country's future.

Let's make schools safe places for kids. Safe places for learning. And an uncomfortable place to be if you are a kid-targeting ACLU bully.

"The Alliance Defense Fund is helping defend a Missouri school district in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and several homosexual activist groups against the district's use of Internet filters," reports Bob Kellogg at OneNewsNow.

"The ACLU and Yale Law School are pushing the 'Don't Filter Me!' campaign to give public school students access to Internet porn," Kellogg continues.

"They claim that because the filters block students from accessing sexually explicit material, including sites operated by homosexual activist groups, they are concerned about censorship and bullying. But David Cortman of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) thinks the groups have a different agenda."

According to Cortman, "It's simply reprehensible that the ACLU and Yale Law School are more concerned about faring their own agenda that exposes children to harm than they are about protecting those children. . . . Certainly, removing porn filters does nothing to end bullying."

In fact, if you want to end bullying in schools, a terrific place to start is by ousting power-hungry homosexualist bullies and power-hungry ACLU bullies, who are the biggest bullies on the block and who are on an unending absolutist crusade to impose their private "values" and perverted practices, under the camouflage of "rights," upon everyone in the land.

Julie Roys writes:

Eighteen-months after my report exposing Wheaton College’s promotion of social justice in its Education Department, the college has revised the department’s conceptual framework. New Wheaton College President Philip Ryken also has removed the college’s official response to my report that had been posted to Wheaton’s website.

As you may recall, my piece revealed that Wheaton’s earlier conceptual framework relied heavily on far Left radicals like Bill Ayers, Paulo Freire, and Richard Rorty. It also included excerpts from my interview with the chair of Wheaton’s Education Department where she refers to Ayers as “enlightening” and claims Marxism is “not necessarily” unbiblical. The report aired in February 2010 on the former Sandy Rios Show on the Salem Broadcasting Network. 

"If you thought that something as innocuous as putting up 3,000 American flags on school grounds to pay tribute to those murdered on September 11 couldn’t be controversial, you haven’t been to Marietta College," writes Jason Mattera at Human Events. 

Are schools now "safe" for homosexualism safe for your kids? Perhaps not.

Consider the following in a report at LifeSiteNews.com:

“We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality. In fact, our very future depends on it. Recruiting children? You bet we are.” 

It seems that guys in cars and raincoats not longer have to offer candy to children to entice them to enter in. Why bother with all of that when you can offer a "safe" "education"?

Why? For spiritual, moral, intellectual, and financial reasons -- so counsels UNC Professor of Criminology Mike Adams.

Or parents could consider a place called Rivendell Sanctuary.

Update
Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

Rivendell Sanctuary has just ordered a shipment of Nancy's great book (if I may say so!) Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity for our semester of Socratic-style studies on critical thinking, theology, and philosophy, beginning August 18.

We offer many additional readings as well, but it's terrific to be able to make the kind of content available in foundational works such as Total Truth to students brave enough to think for themselves and to walk wisely in this world.

Here's the press release (noticed also at Breitbart.com) announcing our decision to join the faculty of Rivendell.

Update
Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

"A homosexual advocacy group is getting taxpayer money to increase the percentage of schools that set up 'safe spaces' for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth," reports CNSNews.com.

This means radicals on a mission from San Francisco will be using your money to target your children or grandchildren for indoctrination into a factually and ethically challenged "life" that discriminates against the Creator and his liberating norms for family life and human sexuality. 

This is not about "equality." That's a buzz-word employed by marketers and deviance-pimps to push their position. You're supposed the hear it and stop thinking and caring -- immediately, if not sooner.

Instead, this is about eviscerating American exceptionalism as a nation of limited government so that human liberty in community with the Creator, who is the source of unalienable human rights, can find expression in all walks of life.

You can read about it in a little thing called the Declaration of Independence. Still legal in some states and some schools.

Do you love your neighbor? Do you care about education? Should schools be a "safe space" for the advance of American exceptionalism and constitutional government? Then defund the propagandists and get them of our schools and away from our kids.

Fear of Critical Thinking? "A study from the Discovery Institute shows that a leading textbook publisher is failing to comply with the new science standards in Texas," reports Bob Kellogg at OneNewsNow.

Nancy and I have joined the faculty of Rivendell Sanctuary, a "new kind of college" based in Bloomington, MN, and now are now on scene to prepare for August classes.

Nancy and Michael have already been here since mid-June. I drove up from the D.C. area last Saturday after taking a couple of weeks to tie up remodeling loose-ends (to prepare our home for renting) and completing transition requirements so our property management company can handle things in Northern Virginia.  

We loved updating our home and are now thrilled to be here in sunny Minnesota. Please drop by and see us at Rivdendell Sanctuary!

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Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

Nancy is speaking Friday, May 27, at the 27th annual North Carolinians for Home Education conference at the Benton Convention Center in Winston-Salem. More than 7,000 people are expected to attend this conference.

At 9:00 a.m. Nancy is scheduled to speak on "Equipping Homeschoolers to Recognize, Resist, and Overcome Secular Worldviews."

At 2:00 p.m. she will speak on "Teaching Christian Worldview Across the Curriculum."

And at 3:30 p.m. Nancy will discuss "Responding Creatively to the Challenge of Feminism."

Here is a schedule of the conference. For more information about North Carolinians for Home Education, please visit their website.

CNSNews.com reports: "Next year on Earth Day, the Obama administration plans to announce which U.S. schools have been selected as 'Green Ribbon Schools,' a designation that will 'honor' schools for 'creating healthy and sustainable learning environments' and for 'teaching environmental literacy'."

"A Southeast Texas teacher has been put on leave pending an investigation into an allegation that he made a racially insensitive comment to a Muslim student referencing the death of Osama bin Laden." More at The Blaze.

OneNewsNow reports:

A conservative military watchdog says the United States Military Academy was right to deny a former cadet readmission to the school because she is a homosexual.

Katherine Miller left West Point in August, halfway through her stint at the Academy, saying she could no longer lie about her sexuality. So when she recently applied to rejoin, officials at the U.S. Military Academy rejected her application.

They explained that the repeal of the policy that bars homosexuals from legal military service, which was accomplished by the 111th lame-duck Congress, has not yet gone into effect -- and will not do so until 60 days after the president and senior defense advisers certify that it will not hurt the troops' ability to fight.

Nancy Pearcey is speaking tomorrow, Saturday, April 30, at an educational conference in Manassas, Va.

Here is a schedule of the event, which is organized by Classical Conversations and will be held at Manassas Baptist Church (Sudley Road).

Nancy is scheduled to speak at 10:15 am and at 1:45 pm. You can also join her for a book-signing at 5:00 pm -- so be sure to bring copies of Saving Leonardo and her other books, as well.

This review of Nancy's book Total Truth appears on the Classical Conversations website. And here is an interview with Nancy.

For more information, download a flyer here. To pre-register, please go here.

"Public school teachers in Tennessee could lose their tenure or their jobs for discussing homosexuality with their students under a new bill," reports Fox News. 

This bill appears to be a good start. Of course teachers should not impose upon students false and pretended social norms that so deeply violate our humanity, our bodies, our male-female diversity, and our life in community with the Creator (see the Declaration of Independence).

On the other hand, of course teachers ought to be able to discuss homosexuality. Living in community with one's neighbor is greatly helped by factually and ethically cautioning others against behaviors and choices that invite personal, social, and civil breakdown.

The way of America is that of the reality-oriented Creator, not of la-la-land San Francisco. Bravo to Tennessee for even considering encouraging teachers to help liberate students from homosexualist oppression.

Male and female created in the image of God. Viva la difference!

The irrepressible Donald Trump has raised still another question the major media have dared not to ask: Did Barack Obama qualify for Columbia and Harvard on his own accomplishments?

"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" asked Trump of the Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."

Trump asks a very good question for which the anti-journalists of the major media have no good answer. So allow me to fill in the gaps.

David Freddoso writes at Beltway Examiner:

Today's Wall Street Journal examines the "Iowa homeschoolers vote" noting that Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul and Herman Cain attended the annual lobby day for the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators yesterday.

Speaking of homeschooling, we The Pearceys have homeschooled our sons.

And Nancy in May has the honor of keynoting a North Carolina homeschooling conference expecting some 9,000 in attendence at the Benton Convention Center in Winston-Salem.

Nancy's new book, Saving Leonardo, was taught to homeschoolers prior to publication. Saving Leonardo issues a challenge to liberate culture from its secular captivity.

We've seen that secular captivity at work in education and politics today, and it is not pretty. 

So when potential candidates for U.S. President court the homeschool vote in places like Iowa, this is a highly positive sign indeed -- for our culture, our politics, our education, and our children.

For understanding that "Homeschoolers can make a difference," "Well done!" to the Iowa Network of Christian Home Educators. Here's their website.

Students who join us at Rivendell Sanctuary will experience learning abroad in Florence, Rome, and Venice. For photos and details, go here.

Update
Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

"Florida public school teachers would lose job security but could make more money if their students do well on standardized tests under a trailblazing bill that went to Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday after a party-line vote in the Republican-controlled state House," reports AP.

"Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, would not say where the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to be involved in primary and secondary education," reports Christopher Goins at CNSNews.com.

"Provost Thomas Burns of Belmont University in Nashville has announced in a statement that the evangelical Christian school has given official approval to its first homosexual student organization," reports LifeSiteNews.com.

If someone bumps into Mr. Burns on campus or via email (thomas.burns@belmont.edu), you might ask: Why on earth would a putatively Christian school embrace a secular, divisive, false, and fragmenting ideology that discriminates against the Creator and the Creator's norms for human sexuality and family life?

This fund helps individuals become "students of honor" at Rivendell Sanctuary, where Nancy and I recently came aboard as faculty tutors (press release).

To learn more about the "Take Back Education Scholarship Fund," go to this website.

"The Idaho legislature has approved a bill that would phase out tenure for new teachers and limit their collective-bargaining rights, marking a victory for lawmakers seeking union reforms in state capitals across the country," reports FoxNews.com. 

"A Christian educator is applauding a national survey that shows more than 900 biology teachers in public high schools are teaching creationism, which is thriving in the classroom," reports OneNewsNow.

"The New York Times recently brought attention to a survey published in an issue of Science magazine that shows only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendation of the National Research Council to only teach evolution," reports the news outlet.

"We really encourage teachers to teach multiple theories: evolution, creationism, intelligent design," says Finn Laursen, executive director of Christian Educators Association International.

"In other words," says Laursen, "just teach the science and let higher level of thinking speak for itself. . . . We know as followers of the biblical truth that if we just study science, it will point back to the Creator. And we even know the Creator's name."

Related
Christianity Is a Science-Starter, Not a Science-Stopper 
Dawkins: Nazi Eugenics "May Not Be Bad"? 
Darwinian Meltdown Reaches England

"On Full Display in Wisconsin," says FrontPage Magazine.

We Ride to Rivendell: Here's the webpage.

Update
Pearceys Resign From Rivendell Sanctuary

They're discussing Saving Leonardo at the Providence Presbyterian Church in Sugar Land, Texas.

"In January the class begins a new discussion on Secularism and Christian Worldview with Saving Leonardo:  A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning by Nancy Pearcey.  Copies are available from Pastor McCall," says the church website.

"An astronomer argues that his Christian faith and his peers' belief that he is an evolution skeptic kept him from getting a prestigious job as the director of a new student observatory at the University of Kentucky," AP reports.

"Martin Gaskell quickly rose to the top of a list of applicants being considered by the university's search committee," says the news service.

"One member said he was 'breathtakingly above the other applicants.' Others openly worried his Christian faith could conflict with his duties as a scientist, calling him 'something close to a creationist' and 'potentially evangelical'."

Related
Christianity Is a Science-Starter, Not a Science-Stopper

Robert Stacy McCain writes at American Spectator:

A gunman who opened fire during a Florida school board meeting before apparently committing suicide left a "testament" on his Facebook page that blamed the "wealthy" for his crime.

Clay Duke, 56, pulled a pistol during a Tuesday school board meeting in Panama City, Fla., and fired several shots, according to press accounts. A security officer for the school system shot and wounded Duke, who then fatally shot himself, police told reporters.

Before pulling the gun, Duke used a can of red spray-paint to make the letter "V" inside a circle on a wall of the meeting room. This was evidently a reference to the 2006 movie V for Vendetta, in which a character uses terrorist tactics to fight an oppressive government.

Related
V Is for Volk: Unmasking the Fascism of Vendetta

Adam Shaw writes at American Thinker: 

London's descent into anarchy over a rise in university tuition fees shows just how deeply the entire leftist enterprise relies on their takeover of the university system. . . . The passion behind the riots (which included not just students, but whole squads of angry leftists) is explained not only by the usual left-wing angst, but also by the fact that the rise in tuition strikes will radically reform the main left-wing recruitment center and training ground -- the university. (emphasis added)

In a column titled, "Should Secularism Be Taught in Public Schools?" Nancy rejects the "dictates of political correctness" and argues that "no 'ism' should be privileged" in the public schools.

And that includes secularism, which is "radically dehumanizing" and undercuts the "worldview that inspired the American Founders, who maintained that human rights are 'endowed' by the Creator."

Far better, she writes, if students are encouraged to think through and examine for themselves the truth-claims of the competing "isms" we face in society today. Nancy explains how to proceed: 

Every system of thought, to be taken seriously, must address the same fundamental questions: What is ultimate reality? What is human nature? What is the basis for morality? And so on. Using the neutral term worldview creates a level playing field that allows for objective contrast and comparison.

"Open debate encourages students to become genuinely critical thinkers," Nancy concludes. "Only free minds can create free societies."

For more on why and how secularism ought to be resisted, please see Nancy's new book, Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning.

Related
Superman vs. Zombies in the Classroom
How Secular Elites Disempower "Values Voter" America 
The Adversary President: Obama vs. America

Secular Straightjacket: "The recent court rulings against students Jennifer Keeton in Georgia and Julea Ward in Michigan reveal the power amassed by the cabal of radicals in academia who have pushed the gay agenda into education," writes Mary Grabar at American Thinker.  

Related
Augusta State University: Change Your Beliefs or No Degree
Faggot Easy to Defend -- Surprising Help From Secular America
Rosie O'Donnell's Oppressive Coat

From FoxNews.com:

The Oregon teacher who declared his mission to "dismantle and demolish" the Tea Party movement resigned before getting the ax, a school spokeswoman told FoxNews.com. . . .

Conestoga Middle School media lab teacher Jason Levin became national news back in April when he announced his intention to bring down the Tea Party on his "Crash the Tea Party” website and in media interviews.

The now-ex Conestoga Middle School media lab teacher said in April that he would seek to embarrass Tea Partiers by attending their rallies dressed as Adolf Hitler, carrying signs bearing racist, sexist and anti-gay epithets and acting as offensively as possible -- anything short of throwing punches.