Free Republic

(AgapePress) - A lesbian who was fired for her role in the notorious "Fistgate" conference at Tufts University has brought a civil suit against two Massachusetts pro-family activists who attended the 2000 conference and then proceeded to expose what went on at the pro-homosexual event.The statewide conference that took place March 25 of that year was actually called "Teach-Out," and was sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. The event's scandalous nickname comes from one of the many sexually explicit topics discussed at...

Last January, I raised a challenge for Notre Dame: to consider how we can affirm the highest principles and practices of a university – ensuring the academic freedom to explore the full range of ideas and expressions produced by human thought and creativity - and, at the same time, to affirm our Catholic character and engage the Catholic intellectual tradition in a way that shapes and enriches the educational experience of our students. The challenge is not to do just one of these – or even to do both of them in parallel – but to promote academic freedom and...

September 16, 2003, 10:30 a.m.On PatrolDiane Ravitch goes inside a protection racket.A Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez iane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, is author, most recently, of The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Ravitch recently talked to NRO about the Language Police. Kathryn Jean Lopez: Who are "the language police"?Diane Ravitch: Read the book and you will see. It is now a process of "bias and sensitivity review" for weeding out anything controversial or offensive. It is self-censorship, which publishers think is high-minded and necessary. It is the result of...

It was a bizarre and emotional courtroom scene, but one occurring with disturbing frequency these days. A popular middle school teacher, 43-year-old Pamela Diehl-Moore, had tearfully pleaded guilty to having sex with a child – a 13-year-old male student who had just completed 7th grade – and now stood before a Hackensack, N.J., judge awaiting sentencing. And what would that sentence be? Considering all the intense media coverage of male sexual predators victimizing female children, one might expect a stiff prison term, accompanied by a withering rebuke. But when New Jersey Superior Court Judge Bruce A. Gaeta opened his...

FAIRFAX, Va. - A Chantilly High School teacher accused of giving marijuana to a student was arrested at his home on Monday. Thomas Newlun, 53, faced charges including marijuana distribution and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. According to police, Newlun allegedly gave a small amount of marijuana to a 17-year-old student after class last Friday. The boy then gave the drugs to a school security officer. Fairfax County Public Schools spokesman Paul Regnier said Newlun is on administrative leave without pay. Newlun, a special education teacher, started working for the system in 1989, and except for being out...

Viroqua, WI - Viroqua High School officials chose to cancel tomorrow's Diversity Day activities after Liberty Counsel presented legal precedent requiring inclusion of the viewpoints of Christians and former homosexuals. The school scheduled sessions for the students that presented the viewpoints of Hmong, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, African-Americans, homosexuals, Latinos, Buddhists, the physically disadvantaged, and the economically disadvantaged, but not Christians or former homosexuals. Diversity Day would have been held tomorrow, March 23, 2006. After a school official stated that the viewpoints of Christians and former homosexuals would be excluded, a resident contacted Liberty Counsel on behalf of many other...

Amid controversy over a homosexual speaker, a high school in Wisconsin has canceled its "Diversity Day" event scheduled for tomorrow. Speakers at Viroqua High School in Viroqua, Wisc., for the biannual event were to include Hmong, Jewish, Muslim, American Indian, African American, Latino, Buddhist, physically handicapped and poor people, the La Crosse Tribune reported. The paper said, however, the event was called off late last week after the Florida-based public-interest legal group Liberty Counsel raised a potential challenge, insisting the program include the viewpoint of a former homosexual. The last event, in 2004, initially was canceled by the school board...

<p>HERE'S another reason to keep my precious daughter away from the public schools: Childless eggheads who dictate educational policy think it's high time kids her age were indoctrinated in the ways of AIDS. Like hell. My child is a first-grader, thriving in an outrageously expensive private school. There, she is learning about arctic puffins and can run faster than most boys. This child is still an innocent - unschooled in the intricacies of procreation, death and incurable disease.</p>

In the spring of 2004, a group of parents in Overland Park, Kansas, sat down with some of their children's assigned reading from school. What they found appalled them-and motivated them to do something about it. Janet Harmon, one of the parents, told Concerned Women for America (CWA) her reaction to her son reading one of the books: "This is a 14-year-old freshman boy, and [the book] had references to oral sex and homosexuality. . I thought it was a mistake!" When these parents spread the word about the books' contents to others, they were met with disbelief. To address...

The debate about Jay Bennish, the Colorado high school teacher who confused a diatribe against the Bush administration with a lesson in geography, is not about free speech, but about the meltdown of Western civilization. Jay Bennish, the product of baby boomer teachers and parents, is not unlike other recent high school and college graduates. He was denied the opportunity for an education. But come to think of it, baby boomers like me were denied educations. I had a Jay Bennish teaching my tenth-grade "social studies" class in 1973 (note the subject name that already reveals the non-academic nature of...

No one familiar with our nation’s increasingly dysfunctional public schools should have found it surprising that a Colorado High School teacher named Jay Bennish delivered a 20 minute, anti-American rant to his 10th grade geography class taken straight out of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore. True enough, Mr. Bennish was somewhat cruder than your average leftist teacher. Apparently, he was also too stupid to realize that political indoctrination in the classroom goes over much more smoothly and is less likely to cause a public uproar if the teacher observes a few minor pedagogical constraints. In fact, Bennish might have been...