Free Republic

I think it would be accurate to conclude that part of Bush's victory can be attributed to increased Christian turn-out. My liberal friends are currently decrying this development, perceiving it as a societal "regression." I, however, think there is more here than meets the eye- that it was not simply the gay marriage matter that brought out the voters, but a general feeling that the liberal elite is hostile to ALL conservative values. The general feeling that the liberal elite doesn't simply disagree with the average American, but holds them and their values in contempt. So- I would like to...

I strongly suspect this incident has more to do with a stupid fandom grudge and the Secret Service doing its damned job. But the liberals on my f-list are using this to shriek about the Patriot Act and the Bush Administration and omgwtfbbqAmericaisafasciststate!!!!!one. So, from people who know what they're talking about, I need to know. What is the standard procedure for the Secret Service when they receive a tip? I'm so sick of the ranting and raving from the left wing of the Live Journal Community and would desperately like to inject some common sense and context. By the...

I've received a few FReep-mails asking about the status of the "Leftism on Campus" ping list. To answer your questions: Yes, the list is still in operation. However, during the past few months, I have been working two jobs to cover a personal debt and with my typical 70-hour work weeks, my available internet time has been very limited of late- and most of that time, I'm afraid, is used maintaining my recreational websites. This will change after the holiday, as my hours at Kohl's will be significantly reduced. Here's to more silly, leftwing campus news in 2004! And apologies...

If anyone doubts the need for an Academic Bill of Rights contact Professor Jay Bergman of Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). Recently, Bergman sent a letter, signed by over twenty people, to the chairman of the university’s board of trustees, noting the lack of intellectual diversity there. He cited several examples. One was a seminar about slavery reparations. According to Bergman it was an indoctrination session. "Not one of the presenters expressed the reasonable opinion, which students attending the seminar were entitled to hear, that reparations are a bad idea," Bergman wrote. In addition to the reparations seminar, Bergman cited...

"Sunlight," Justice Brandeis observed, "is the best disinfectant." Currently a Senate panel is conducting hearings over the lack of intellectual diversity tolerated by American universities. Despite the problem, which finds the reflexively socialist stances of the modern academy in stark relief against the more diverse hues of modern American society, a panelist before the committee said that the problem wasn't to be solved with legislation. Speaking before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Anne D. Neal, president of the American Councils of Trustees and Alumni, a group that was smeared as neo-McCarthyists for citing their sources in...

Most parents would not knowingly send their kids to a college where radical political and sexual indoctrination by the faculty and administration was virtually inescapable. Most parents would be concerned if their offspring were taught that the Arab television network al-Jazeera was the best source of news about the Iraq war or if faculty and administrators indoctrinated students with a one-sided message about U.S. foreign policy both inside and outside the classroom, then helped them organize protests against their country. Most parents would be concerned if their kids were exhorted to have sex by campus-sponsored speakers or encouraged to get...

Of all Western nations, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have had some form of legalized gay marriage the longest. My question is: Has anyone here encountered any longitudinal or sequential studies that have been conducted in these countries (which seem to me to be good test cases) examining the social effects of legal gay marriage?

I am arguing with somebody on another board about sex education and pre-marital sex, and that old "they are going to do it anyway, so we should teach them about protection" argument has come up. Ugh. I hate that argument. I think it's insulting to our teenagers, and I think saying "you should be abstinent, but if you're going to have sex, here's your condom" sends a very muddled message. It's also dishonest, given the diseases that can be passed through skin-to-skin contact.

Social Studies instruction is a boring, muddled, content-free mess, writes Chester Finn in a fine tirade. For a long time, this field's decline resembled that of the Roman Empire protracted, inexorable and sad, but not something one could do much about, even as evidence mounted that youngsters were emerging from high school with scant knowledge of history, geography, civics or economics. Evidence also mounted that the movers and shapers within social studies had little respect for Western civilization; a disposition to view America as a problem for mankind rather than its best hope; a tendency to pooh-pooh history's factual highlights...

In a July letter to colleges and universities across the country, Gerald Reynolds, head of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, addressed "a subject," as he put it, "of central importance to our government, our heritage of freedom and our way of life: the First Amendment." Mr. Reynolds' office doesn't have the authority to bring lawsuits to enforce the First Amendment. What, you might wonder, possessed him to write a letter about it? The answer begins with the fact that hundreds of colleges and universities have policies restricting speech that the First Amendment protects. Called "speech codes" when initiated...

Hate America 101 By Fox NewsFox News | August 26, 2003 Some parents in Farmington, Mich., are crying "anti-Americanism" over a high school international affairs class. The course is offered to juniors and seniors in the Farmington School District and focuses on America's role in the Middle East (search). But it's not the topic that's angered some students' parents. It's the class readings, many of which come from left-wing Web sites like Alternet.org, Indymedia.org, Progressive.org and War-times.org, that vigorously attack the Bush administration (search)."This belief that we have to show that every concept out of that society can be understood and excused...

THIS week, Rashid Khalidi starts his new job as the first Edward Said Chair of Middle East Studies at Columbia University, as well as director of the school's Middle East Institute. His arrival augments the school's already acute problems of extremism and intolerance on the Middle East. Examples of Columbia's problems: * Outspoken Palestinian advocates - openly antagonistic to Israel and Zionism - teach every course offered on the politics or history of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). * 78 percent of MEALAC faculty members signed a petition that compares...

Has anyone else visited Jewish World Review today? They have this announcement on the top of the page: "JWR Editor in Chief Binyamin L. Jolkovsky was hospitalized Sunday and apologizes for not publishing today. He requests that you please pray for Binyamin Leib ben Pesha." I hope he makes it through whatever it is. I will certainly be praying for him.

Conservative students who unleashed the protest against UNC-Chapel Hill's reading program will sit down today with Chancellor James Moeser, but they won't be debating "Nickel and Dimed." The students, who earlier this year formed a group called the Committee for a Better Carolina, have a broader agenda. They say conservative students are uncomfortable and intimidated on a campus that is overwhelmingly liberal, and they want the university to commit to big changes. First, they will ask Moeser to include political affiliation and ideology in the university's official nondiscrimination policy. They also want the university to devote more money to bring...

A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended. In no country has the process of vulgarization gone further than in Britain: in this , at least, we lead the world. A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and antisocial attempts to satisfy them. The mass drunkenness seen on weekends in the center...

Aristotle perhaps didn't go far enough when he said that tragedy was more philosophic than history, concentrating as it does on what might be rather than merely on what had been. He might have gone on to say that tragedy- or, more broadly, literature- is more philosophic even than philosophy. It is a form of knowledge that draws on all our ways of knowing, rather than on ratiocination alone. And it is a more intense form of knowledge, since, unlike philosophy, it isn't constantly taking its own pulse, or checking its instruments, anxiously asking itself how it can know this...

Compassionate conservatism works because it addresses people as individuals rather than as faceless units in a throng. Conservative Compassion Vs. Liberal Pity A remarkable feature of President Bush's pronouncements is his unashamed use of the "L" word. Mr. Bush calls his political philosophy "compassionate conservatism," but he is not afraid to say the older, stronger word that gives that philosophy its meaning. The word is love. Mr. Bush used the word when, during the presidential campaign, he was confronted by a man who spoke loosely and negligently of illegitimate children and the welfare system. When the man uttered the...

Which of the following stories would be too biased for schools to allow on tests? 1) Overcoming daunting obstacles, a blind man climbs Mount McKinley; 2) dinosaurs roam the Earth in prehistoric times; 3) an Asian-American girl, whose mother is a professor, plays checkers with her grandfather and brings him pizza. As you probably guessed, all three stories are deeply biased. 1) Emphasis on a "daunting" climb implies that blindness is some sort of disability, when it should be viewed as just another personal attribute, like hair color. Besides, mountain-climbing stories are examples of "regional bias," unfair to readers who...

Cornell University’s professors and researchers are becoming increasingly brazen in their ideological war against President George W. Bush. During the last several weeks, a professor in the Department of Asian Studies has developed and advertised a new course on President Bush’s attempt to create “an imperial empire.” At the same time, a university-funded Latino research center is proudly selling propaganda posters that compare President Bush to former German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Asian Studies Professor Brett de Bary is promoting a course that he says will be “team-taught” by the Cornell Forum for Peace and Justice (CFPJ). This course will not...

FrustratedCitizen has just come across an amusing story on another board- apparently, a feminist group at Stockholm University in Sweden is attempting to ban the urinal. Yes, that's right- the urinal. Because if women can't pee standing up, then men can't do it either. I kid you not- I googled this, and found a few old blog entries (dated 2000) regarding this. It appears to be the real deal.