RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-open-letter-to-the-uconn-community/?fbclid=IwAR3jcJQbIoVFiEkNYkM3ALQ-VQFI3SASsi4dynSgBHB3o6XTMt4ql38X02o

To my fellow students and members of the UConn community:

Those of you who know me personally know that, throughout my nearly four years here, I have always been a staunch advocate for free speech.

My parents grew up in the former Soviet Union, where they did not have the luxury of condemning the oppressive regime that governed their lives, and where they had the word “Jew” stamped under Nationality in their passports, defining who they could and could not be under a system of institutionalized discrimination. They fled to the US as refugees in the nineties so that I might have a chance at a better life. I have never taken this for granted. I was raised to speak up against injustice, and it’s been a part of who I am for as long as I can remember.

Like many of you, I have taken immense pride in being a part of a diverse and vibrant community here at UConn. Our university promises to encourage freedom of expression through civil discourse, stating that “debate surrounding discussion of difficult and controversial subjects is a key component to our university.” Throughout my nearly four years here, I’ve seen the administration deliver on this promise, voicing its support for many minority groups and encouraging tolerance among the student body.

However, in light of a recent series of experiences on campus, I am forced to call into question the University’s commitment to this promise and my fellow students’ understanding of it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/new-stasi-central-connecticut-state-university-jay-bergman/

Last month, in a statement issued by its Office of Equity and Inclusion, Central Connecticut State University established a new policy designating faculty, administrators, and nearly all other employees as “mandated reporters.” In that capacity, they are required to report to this office any information they come across pertaining to “gender-based discrimination.”  Infractions indicative of such discrimination range from “sexual misconduct” – a capacious concept that at other universities has included jokes told within earshot of persons who consider them sexist – to “dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking.”  And to ensure that every instance of discrimination is rooted out, persons reporting it can do so anonymously.

The statement establishing this policy raises more questions than it answers.  First, and most obviously, it fails to include any definition of “gender-based discrimination,” or any indication of its limits.  Can such discrimination manifest itself in speech as well as in action?  If it did, could any punishment by the university be reconciled with its stated commitment to academic freedom, and to the right to free expression guaranteed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and in Article I, Section 5 of the Connecticut State Constitution?

Other aspects of this new policy are no less problematic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/florida-aims-end-sexualization-children-larry-sand/

“In Florida, 33% of eighth graders are proficient in reading and 20% of the state’s residents over the age of 15 are illiterate. As such, maybe it’s time that the schools start focusing on what they have been traditionally mandated to do, and give up their warped social engineering game plan.”

The stories are jaw dropping, infuriating, and plentiful. The school district in St. Paul, MN is partnering with an organization that offers LGBTQ-affirming curricula for students as young as three years old. In Idaho, an 11-year-old girl was coached by her Coeur d’Alene school into a sex change without notifying her parents. As reported by Abigail Shrier, the California Teachers Association held a conference in October 2021, where it advised teachers “on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.”

Sadly, the above is just a drop in the perverse bucket. Stories abound nationwide of teachers and school administrators doing things to students that would be unheard of just a few years ago. In response, the state of Florida is fighting back.

https://americanmind.org/features/parents-rights/the-right-can-win-on-parents-rights/

Following Trump’s lead, a grassroots movement has forced the GOP to fight.

“There’s no such thing as other people’s children,” proclaimed the advocacy group “Together Rising” recently on Twitter. This was in response to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s bill protecting parents’ rights, denying schools the ability to instruct children in sexual orientation and gender identity prior to the fourth grade. This was an outrage to leftists, who ludicrously designated the bill “Don’t Say Gay” and furiously demanded to continue teaching every child—including yours—about every kind of sex.

It has always been an assumption among leftists that experts, rather than parents, ought to be in charge of child-rearing. They used to say it more subtly: “It takes a village,” they would murmur, with winsome smiles. But in recent decades, this faux rhetoric has given way to a much more direct attack. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, during a pivotal race this year in which President Biden campaigned on his behalf.

Frustrated by the general public’s hesitancy to embrace new, increasingly bizarre ideologies at a moment’s notice, woke elites have found it necessary to assert their power over children with more urgency. Attorney General Merrick Garland labeled concerned parents “domestic terrorists” this year, using the administration’s favorite catch-all accusation to subject dissidents to the full force of the law. Marx’s old demand to abolish the nuclear family has come back in vogue, popularized most notably by Black Lives Matter. Other examples of anti-parent hostility abound.

https://www.city-journal.org/diversity-is-a-smokescreen-in-college-admissions

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two more cases challenging the use of race as a criterion in college admissions, as has allegedly happened at Harvard University (a private institution) and the University of North Carolina (public). On the surface, the argument turns on whether the desire for a diverse student body trumps many laws and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit discrimination and guarantee equal protection to all. The question applies to virtually all universities because they are either public or accept government money.

The main argument in favor of discrimination in admissions is that diversity enhances the educational experience. But is it true that a student body needs to parallel, even roughly, the demographics of the general population to ensure that students are exposed to people from diverse backgrounds? In fact, we would argue that the very process of using affirmative action—read: “discrimination”—to enhance the numbers of designated identity groups can contribute to the tribalization of the student body rather than helping it cohere into a harmonious whole. Furthermore, even after receiving an affirmative action boost, minority students sufficiently qualified for a given university are already likely to have similar backgrounds to non-minority students, thus limiting the diversity of viewpoints and experiences that affirmative action allegedly enhances.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/theres_a_cultural_revolution_occurring_in_americas_legal_system.html

People who hate lawyers like to quote Shakespeare’s line from Henry VI: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That’s completely wrong. In the play, it was the anarchy-demanding mob that gave voice to the sentiment. Lawyers are the bulwark of the rule of law and civil society. That’s why it matters that today’s law students and young lawyers are demanding that any lawyers who deviate from woke principles when it comes to representing people or issues must be silenced and, if possible, destroyed.

It used to be that every law student learned about John Adams successfully representing the hugely unpopular British soldiers charged with murder for the Boston Massacre. He did so because he understood a principle that I vividly remember my criminal law professor articulating almost 40 years ago: Nobody, no matter the charge against him, should have to stand alone before the awesome majesty of the government which, ultimately, is both judge and executioner.

That concept is completely lost today, something that burst into full public awareness last week when more than 100 Yale law students, through noise and physical intimidation, made it impossible for Kristen Waggoner, of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, to speak (ironically enough) about free speech—with almost no administrative pushback and no consequences.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/19/who-will-be-americas-teachers/

The essential quality of a teacher, I have long believed, is the desire to share what he has found of the true or good or beautiful, or at least useful—which means that it will be good in an immediate instrumental way, serving some obvious human need or wholesome desire. The teacher says, “Come, look at this!” And he shows you the great painting of the Crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna (d. 1506), and the dramatic moment, set into the background of the work, not in the center but all the more arresting for its being understated, when the centurion looks upon Christ and says, “Surely, this was the Son of God.” He shows you not just what there is to see in the painting, but how to see. He gives you eyes.

The first time I listened to the polyphonic music of the Renaissance, I did not know what I had come upon. It was Thomas Tallis’ 40-voice motet, Spem in alium. I had expected a stanzaic hymn. This was just a verse or two from Scripture, set to music. I had expected a clear and single melodic line. This was a tissue of 40 melodic lines woven together simultaneously. I might as well have been a native of the jungles of Borneo, gaping at the turbine of a hydroelectric dam. I didn’t have a teacher to help me, at least not one I could speak to; it was instead Palestrina who “taught” me, by means of fewer and more immediately discernible polyphonic lines, what I was hearing, or what I could learn to hear, when I listened to Spem in alium. It happened while I was listening to the Creed in Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, and I heard three separate voices, each following right upon the other, singing the word simul simultaneously and not simultaneously, expressing musically the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It flashed upon me that this was profoundly intellectual music, like the façade of a medieval cathedral. Palestrina gave me ears.

We need teachers with eyes and ears. We will not get them.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/17/hundreds-of-yale-students-protest-free-speech-event-featuring-progressive-and-conservative-speakers/

A free speech event hosted at Yale University that featured both conservative and progressive speakers was shouted down last week by over 100 far-left radicals from the university’s law school.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the panel was hosted on March 10th by the Yale Federalist Society, and featured Monica Miller of the left-wing American Humanist Association, and Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. The purpose of the panel was to demonstrate that even two activists with such different political beliefs could agree on several things when it comes to the assault on freedom of speech in America today, as both groups had been involved in at least one Supreme Court case together dealing with violations of the First Amendment, when the Court sided with a Christian student in a Georgia university who was initially forbidden from preaching on campus.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/d-c-judge-suggests-yale-students-who-shouted-down-speakers-should-be-barred-from-clerkships/

A D.C. appellate judge urged colleagues to consider whether Yale University students who shout down speakers on campus should be be barred from clerkships, in an email to fellow judges published by lawyer David Lat on his Substack.

Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals emailed all Article III judges on Thursday, according to Lat, following news that about 100 Yale Law School students protested a panel discussion on civil liberties. The disruption of the panel event, hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, was reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

“The latest events at Yale Law School, in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech, prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted,” Silberman wrote in the email.

“All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships,” Silberman added.

Several other judges replied to Silberman in an email chain.

“Thank you for your email. I couldn’t agree more,” wrote Judge John Walker of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, according to Slate.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/imam-who-defended-honor-killings-and-sex-slavery-daniel-greenfield/

The great thing about being an Islamist in the Ms. Marvel era is that no matter what awful things they catch you saying, there will be no consequences. After some initial awkwardness, everyone will back away for a few months or a year… and then the party is back on.

When Bernie Sanders appeared with Imam Omar Suleiman, the Imam’s hateful views became an issue and the Sanders campaign temporarily backed away. These days you’ll find virtually no mention of it. Google is helpfully suppressing search results on the subject and so there’s a magical clean slate.

And now Suleiman’s going to be speaking at Oakland University on the challenge of being a Muslim in America. It’s tough when they won’t let you kill your daughters.

“Sisters, you know what happens with a really jealous Dad? He kills you and he kills the guy,” a smiling Imam Suleiman told Muslim female college students at an Islamist youth event. “Even if they don’t have a man who’s going to be a real man, Allah has more than any man.”