Tag Archives: #FreedomOfReligion

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The Feds believe that conservative Catholics are an extremist threat FBI Director Christopher Wray flat out lied to Congress about Bureau's surveillance of Catholics

We reported, last February, on the story that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was targeting “Radical Traditionalist Catholics”, with a memo from the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia:

Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com.

A priest elevates the Eucharist after consecrating it during a Latin Mass. Photo by Andrew Gardner/Creative Commons

“In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on the key assumption that [racially or ethnically motivated extremists] will continue to find [radical-traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology attractive and will continue to attempt to connect with RTC adherents, both virtually via social media and in-person at places of worship,” the document from January 23 states.It adds that “RTCs are typically categorized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) as a valid church council; disdain for most of the popes elected since Vatican II, particularly Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II; and frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology. Radical-traditionalist Catholics compose a small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents and are separate and distinct from ‘traditionalist Catholics’ who prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions, without the more extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”

Once this was disclosed, the FBI quickly told us that this was the product of one field office, and was withdrawn because it didn’t meet the Bureau’s standards of quality. Director Christopher Wray said:

We do not conduct investigations based on religious affiliation or practices, full stop. We have also now ordered our inspection division to take a look at how this happened and try to figure out how we can make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Yeah, uh huh, right.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The FBI and ‘Radical’ Catholics

New evidence suggests the bureau probe was wider than director Christopher Wray said.

by The Editorial Board | Wednesday, August 9, 2023 | 12:02 PM EDT

Remember the tempest this year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was found to be targeting some Catholics as “extremists?” The bureau cast it as the work of a single rogue field office. Well, it looks like the effort was more widespread than our G-men admitted to the public.

That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.

This story began in February when a whistleblower leaked a heavily redacted January report from the FBI’s Richmond office: “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

The document defined “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as those who attend the Latin Mass and who frequently adhere to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.” The agents relied on half-baked “open-source” reporting from liberal outlets to justify more bureau investigation.

“Open source” reporting, huh? Brittany Bernstein noted that the FBI report was sourced from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left source which supports just about every #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading position out there, and calls the Moms4Liberty extremists because they don’t want the public schools pushing the homosexual and transgender agendas. A screen capture of the Catholic organizations that the SPLC considers to be “Radical Traditional Catholic Hate Groups” in the United States can be found here.[2]Full disclosure: Yes, I am Catholic, but have little opportunity to attend a Tridentine Mass. Due to my significant hearing loss, a Traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass, in which the priest … Continue reading

FBI headquarters quickly said the report didn’t meet its “exacting standards” and had been withdrawn. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Judiciary Committee in July that the report was “a single product by a single field office.” He added that “as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” and he said he began an internal probe.

On July 25 the FBI finally provided the committee with a less-redacted version of that Richmond document. The report says that its information on Catholics was “primarily derived” from an “FBI Richmond contact”; an “FBI Portland liaison contact” who informed on a subject who “gravitated to” traditionalist catholicism; and an “FBI Undercover Employee” who reported on a subject who attended a Catholic church in California.

It also says the FBI’s Los Angeles field office “initiated an investigation” into a subject, and that the Richmond office “[c]oordinated with” FBI Portland to prepare the field report. In other words, this was a widespread bureau effort. Why was this suspicion about religion so widespread at the FBI?

The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal might not be able to answer that question, because the answer involves their own culture. The federal government, including the FBI, are dominated by the same Ivy League, northeastern elites as the Journal, and, to them, there’s a frightening issue. Remember the exchange between Center For American Progress fellow John Halpin and Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, in the e-mails hacked by Wikileaks:

Mr Halpin: Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) …they must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.

Miss Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

It’s all the same thing to them: Catholicism is ‘acceptable,’ as long as it is the go-along-to-get-along Catholicism of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, attending Mass on Sunday, but with political positions completely subservient to the Democratic Party. Actual Catholicism, with its prohibition on homosexuality, transgenderism, and abortion, scare the poop out of them, and must be not just conservate but actually threatening. That the ‘radical traditional Catholics’ are becoming a stronger, if nevertheless in the distance, voice in the Church worries them that, Heaven forfend!, they might just become politically stronger.

Also troubling is the FBI’s decision to redact the Portland and Los Angeles roles from the original version of the Richmond document it provided Congress in March. In a letter with the less-redacted version, acting assistant FBI director Christopher Dunham said the redactions had been necessary to protect “information specific to ongoing criminal investigations.”

What “ongoing criminal investigations”? What crimes were the FBI investigating that tied them in with Catholics who prefer the Tridentine Mass? Have any of those investigations resulted in charges against anybody?

Well, we may not know the answers to those questions, but we do know one thing: the Director of the FBI deliberately lied to Congress! What is going to be done about that?

Of course, we know the real reasons: while the Catholic Church is opposed to prenatal infanticide, those wicked ‘radical traditional Catholics’ tend to be more intensely devout, and more politically conservative, and we can’t have that, can we? President Biden is both a Democrat and a Catholic, but we have seen just how much he prioritizes the former over the latter.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.

By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 Full disclosure: Yes, I am Catholic, but have little opportunity to attend a Tridentine Mass. Due to my significant hearing loss, a Traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass, in which the priest celebrates the Eucharist ad orientem, with his back to the people, I would be completely lost.
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Anti-Semitism is a serious problem, but restricting the Freedom of Speech and of the Press is not the way to fight it

We reported, on Thursday, how someone had distributed white supremacist flyers in Lexington’s Kenwick neighborhood, flyers contained in baggies, using rice to weigh them down enough not to be swept away by the wind. The Lexington Police Department was investigating, with Lt Dan Truex stating that the LPD were “very interested in identifying” “who possibly left those flyers,” yet, at the end of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s report, the Department spokesman was either unable or unwilling to specify just what actual crime had been committed or what charges the distributor of the flyers might face.

Now, thanks to a tweet from my good friend and occasional website pinch hitter, William Teach, I found this from WRAL News:

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers distributed in at least 5 north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers appeared in at least five north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight.

Sunday, August 6, 2023 | 11:12 AM EDT | Updated 4:14 PM EDT

Anti-Semitic flyers distributed in Raleigh. Photo via WRAL News. Click to enlarge.

Hundreds of anti-semitic flyers appeared in at least five north Raleigh neighborhoods overnight.

Someone really needs to educate the WRAL intern that subtitles are supposed to be significantly different from the main headline! 🙂

The flyers link to a website to an organization called Goyim Defense League, which is currently tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law.

While I have exactly zero support for the so-called Goyim Defense League, telling me that the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center — the name of which WRAL got slightly wrong — classifies an organization as a “hate group” doesn’t impress me in the slightest. The SPLC has similarly trashed Moms 4 Liberty, a group trying to protect children from the far-left transgender agenda, even though the ‘transgender’ lobby are trying to impose control of people’s speech.

One woman, who wished to remain anonymous, discovered a multitude of fliers left on neighbors’ driveways while taking an evening walk in Fairfax Hills. Just three minutes away, another woman reported more hate flyers in her own neighborhood of Hickory Hills. Just a few more minutes away, another neighbor near North Hills reported finding one of the flyers.

North Ridge also woke up to anti-semitic flyers in their driveways. According to neighbors, there’s a notable Jewish population in North Ridge due to its walkable distance to the Orthodox Synagogue on Falls of Neuse Road. The synagogue appears to be very close to all of the neighborhoods targeted.

Unlike the Lexington situation, in which the white supremacist flyers were distributed in the heavily white, as in 89.9% white, Kenwick neighborhood, the Raleigh incident was somewhat close to a Jewish neighborhood. Nevertheless, unless an actual threat was communicated, it should be protected speech.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said a person caught distributing these flyers could be charged with ethnic intimidation if the it contains a threat.

That’s a Class 1 misdemeanor, meaning someone convicted of that crime could face up to 120 days in jail.

Unlike the Lexington flyers, which, from the single image I could find of them, simply directed readers to a website, the Raleigh flyers shown in the WRAL report had a much larger variety of things printed. However, in the admittedly limited views shown, I could see no actual threat. Rather, the flyers made fanciful and stupid claims about Jews, including a reference to the long-debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the creation of Russian anti-Semites around 1902-3, a time in which Tsar Nikolai II was still an absolute monarch. Laughably, the Raleigh flyers date the Protocols as 1897, before they were written. No one with any knowledge of this stuff who isn’t already anti-Semitic is going to swallow this junk.

Anti-Semitism is a serious problem, but the way to fight it is not to restrict the freedom of speech and of the press. If you find anti-Semitic, or in the Lexington case, white supremacist garbage, just pick it up and throw it in the trash.

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Remember you haters! Calling them ‘groomers’ and saying that ‘they’re coming after our kids’ is sexist, homophobic, transphobic and just plain false!

There are times I think that I’ve written on the subject of ‘transgenderism’ too frequently, but it keeps coming up in the news. I wouldn’t care if Jack wanted to call himself Jill, if the ‘transgendered’ weren’t trying to use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their delusions.

You will not find this story many places, and certainly not in the leftist part of the credentialed media. From the New York Post:

California school suspends 2 children for misgendering classmate

By Hannah Grossman , Fox News | Friday, July 7, 2023 | 3:31 PM EDT | Updated

A California school district suspended two children for five days after a misgendering incident took place, and then subjected them to a training called “restorative justice,” according to an email reviewed by Fox News Digital.

The email was sent by a recently departed principal of Herbert Hoover High School located in the Glendale Unified School District. It was first reported by GUSD Parents Voices.

The former principal, Jennifer Earl, described two students who misgendered a transgender student, and then ran away as the teacher attempted to correct them.

There’s some disagreement here. The Post story states that the students correctly referenced a student’s sex “misgendered a transgender student,” but the local Fox 11 report has the suspended student “misgendering” a teacher.

So, what is “restorative justice” in the Glendale United School District? The district has a handy graph of its system, as shown in a photo in the Post. It has “Control” on one axis, defined as “Pressure Limits (and?) Expectations”, which can only mean that the district believes that, in the case of “restorative justice”, high pressure is acceptable, as long as it is accompanied with high levels of “Support – Encouragement – Nurturing”.

Further down:

GUSD explained to Fox News Digital that they make determinations if a misgendering – generally defined as using the wrong pronouns – is considered bullying based on whether a student’s perceived intent.

“A student has never been punished, much less suspended, for accidentally using the wrong pronoun to refer to a peer or staff member. However, a student could be suspended if the action escalated to harassment or bullying,” a spokesperson said.

Translation: if we assume that the school district’s spokescritter is telling the truth, the district decided that the “action escalated to harassment or bullying”.

Now we get to the district’s definition of a re-education camp “restorative justice”

The district’s website explains restorative justice on its website.

Restorative justice is a re-education of students and gaining control over a situation based on the perceived wrongs they committed.

So, even the district uses the term “re-education”. Got it!

First the person making the restorative justice circle will ask “barrier breaking” questions, such as:

“What is the greatest value that guides your life?”

“What gives you the most security?”

“If you could smash one thing… what would you smash?”

If I could smash one thing, it would be the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls.

“Describe the ideal family.”

Simple: a mother and father, married to each other, living with and rearing their minor children. Anything else, anything else, is less than ideal. This is the system which successful human societies have had for as far back into the past as we have any real knowledge of human sociological structures.

The district’s website continues, “When there is harm or conflict within the established community, restorative responses help to repair the damage. This is done through processes that bring harmed and harmers together to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals. As a result, community is once again restored bringing back a sense of belonging to all.”

So, “restorative justice” exists when the “harmed and harmers” are brought together, but note the rest: “to address root causes of the conflict, support accountability for those responsible, and promote healing for impacted individuals.” Simply put, “restorative justice” cannot be achieved unless the two students who correctly recognized the ‘transgender’ person’s sex who “misgendered” someone agree that the Special Snowflake™ person they correctly referenced “misgendered” is actually the sex the transgender individual claims to be rather than the sex they actually are, and say that they are oh-so-sorry.

Simply put, the Glendale Unified School District is teaching that transgenderism is real, that a person actually can change his ‘gender,’ and if you decline to go along with that notion, you will be punished.

Remember how we have been told that the government may not establish a religion? Well, the Catholic Church, the majority of Protestant Christian denominations, Judaism, and Islam all agree that transgenderism is not something with which their faiths agree, yet the Glendale Unified School District, apparently as required by law in California, are teaching something major which is against the religious faiths of most Americans.

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The ‘Wise Latina’ says the quiet part out loud.

At the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Those words were fished out after President Barack Hussein Obama nominated her to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. What can those words mean other than, as a jurist, Hudge Sotomayor would take her decisions, at least in part, based not on the law, but on her race, sex, and ethnicity.

She backed away from that statement in her confirmation hearings, “declaring it ‘a rhetorical flourish that fell flat’ and stating that ‘I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,'” and she was ultimately confirmed, 68 to 31.

Well, today Associate Justice told us, once again, that it isn’t what is written in the law, or the Constitution, that is important, but people’s feelings! In her dissent in 303 Creative v Elenis, she wrote:

The meaning of our Constitution is not found in any law volume, but in the spirit of the people who live under it.[1]303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.

This is rather remarkable. The Justice, utterly horrified by the decision that a Colorado web designer could not be compelled to create a website for a same-sex ‘wedding,’ cited precedent after precedent telling us that the government could, and has, gotten away with both restricting and compelling various forms of commercial speech, along with dozens of citations of laws and court cases concerning equal access to commerce and commercial enterprises. Yet, after all of that long dissent, she broke down and told us that what was written in the law just flat didn’t matter. What mattered, according to our ‘wise Latina,’ is how the people who live in the United States feel about things.

This is a hugely dangerous position, but one which is hardly unexpected. Justice Sotomayor voted against religious freedom in the cases of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak and South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, but railed against the decision, this time supporting the freedom of religion and assembly in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v Cuomo. The cases were all about the same thing: the states forcing churches to close, due to the COVID-19 penicdemic, and Justice Sotomayor believed that the virus trumped the Constitution of the United States.

The good Justice also saw nothing wrong with restricting our Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and McDonald v City of Chicago, or upholding equal protection under the law in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The plain words of the Constitution meant nothing to Justice Sotomayor, or the other liberals on the Court, as they went through all sorts of contortions to say that somehow, some way, the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution just didn’t matter when it came to liberal policies.

The liberals on the Court are hardly the only ones who want to massage the words of the Constitution to mean something other than what they say. The Editorial Board of The New York Times opined:

In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure.

The Editorial Board spend many words telling us why Affirmative Action is so desperately needed, yet never manage to give us a reason as to how it fits under the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thursday’s ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by all of the Republican-appointed justices, takes a long time to make a simple — and simplistic — point: There is no real difference between the centuries of racial discrimination against Black people and targeted race-conscious efforts to help Black people. Both are equally bad, in this view.

Left unaddressed was one of the Chief Justice’s points, that, in the context of university admissions, which are a zero-sum game, helping black applicants has another effect, hurting white and Asian applicants.

There is so much more that could be said, but, in the end, it boils down to this: the left have programs in mind which elevate the programs of the government over the rights of individuals, and today’s left are fine with that. And that is why sensible people must fight the left, fight for our rights, because the left won’t help us.

References

References
↑1 303 Creative v Elenis, , page 38 of dissent, page 70 of the .pdf file.
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The left really despise Freedom of Speech

The American Revolution was slowly being brewed by the resentments our colonial forebears felt for the really not that oppressive rule by King George III across the wide Atlantic Ocean, and Parliament’s desire that the colonists pay for the costs of their own defense in the French and Indian War. It was our freedom of speech and of the press, things His Majesty might not have liked all that much, but wasn’t in any real position to do much about them, which enabled disaffected colonists to come together in their opposition to rule by Great Britain.

Thus, you’d think that the staffers at the American Revolution Museum would have a great respect for freedom of speech. Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong!

American Revolution Museum staffers are fighting to cancel a Moms for Liberty event

The Museum has sought to diversify the stories it tells about American history and staffers said that allowing such a group to rent its space undermines the progress the museum has made.

by Juliana Feliciano Reyes | Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Nearly 40 staffers at the Museum of the American Revolution are demanding that museum leadership cancel a scheduled event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a “parents’ rights” group recently classified as an “antigovernment extremist organization” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Can we tell the truth here? The SPLC sees every conservative organization as ‘extremist,’ and would undoubtedly list the American Free News Network as extremist if AFNN appeared on their radar. “Parents’ rights” would certainly qualify as “extremists” to them, because the apparently wholly radical idea that parents, whose children are subject to compulsory education laws, ought to have control of what public education teaches their children is just so, so, so wrong!

You can tell how Moms for Liberty work, from their statements on their website.

The Museum, located in Old City, has sought to diversify the stories it tells about American history — its current special exhibition, “Black Founders,” is a first-of-its-kind spotlight on James Forten, a prominent Black Revolutionary War-era abolitionist — and staffers said allowing such a group to rent its space undermines the progress the museum has made.

“We do not feel that any dollar amount is worth endangering the safety of the museum staff members in the building on the day of the event, serving as a host to a group that does not stand with our values, and damaging the museum’s reputation that we have all worked so hard to build,” a petition signed by 39 staffers reads. The museum employs 75 people full time and 37 part time.

“(E)ndangering the safety of the museum staff members”? Are they accusing the Moms of coming in armed, ready to shoot the staffers, or perhaps beat them with Louisville Slugger baseball bats?

They do hold some truly radical views, claiming that they do not ‘co-parent’ with the government, and they were early in on resistance to the forced masking of children due to the COVID panicdemic.

And horror of horrors, they fought against the long-term closures of the public schools, forcing students into the disastrous remote education policies. The public schools in Philadelphia stayed closed longer than many systems due to the resistance of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers union resistance to reopening fir in-person classes.

Moms for Liberty, an organization that sought control over public education by banning books and removing curriculum related to race, gender, and sexuality, is hosting its national summit in Philadelphia at the end of this month. Featured speakers are to include GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The site of the summit — the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown — has already been protested by queer and trans-led groups.

Heaven forfend! The Moms wanted to stop the politicization of race in the public schools and the indoctrination of children into acceptance of homosexuality and ‘transgenderism.’ As William Teach noted, there has been a significant upsurge in younger people identifying as homosexual, bisexual, and/or ‘transgendered’ in the past few years, something that could only be caused by ‘grooming,’ by making those things seem acceptable. If individual parents wish to teach their children that such things are acceptable, that’s on them, but what the left and the teachers’ unions want to do is to indoctrinate everyone’s kids to accept that s(tuff).

Naturally, Juliana Feliciano Reyes, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who wrote the cited article, said that the Moms were “banning books”, without the qualification that they wanted those books out of public school libraries, period, and not trying to, or able to, prevent private libraries, bookstores, or Amazon.com from having and selling them.

(CEO R. Scott Stephenson) said no employees were required to work that night if they didn’t feel safe.

But for some employees, the damage has already been done.

“I don’t feel appreciated nor safe anymore,” said assistant curator Trish Norman, who is nonbinary. “I don’t feel the museum necessarily has my back.”

Miss Norman doesn’t feel safe anymore? Unless she is alleging that the Moms and their guests are going to assault her in some fashion, she is telling us that her precious little feelings might get hurt.

In a photo published in the article, one protester is carrying a sign saying “Free to Learn.” That’s absolutely right: she is free to teach her kids whatever she wishes. But what she apparently doesn’t want is other parents not wanting their children taught the same things the protester wants.

Well, in the American Revolution that the museum is supposed to celebrate, some American men fought and died to gain our freedom to say and believe whatever we wished, fought and died to give all Americans, even the Moms for Liberty, the right to say and advocate whatever they wished.

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The left want to control your thoughts by controlling your language

To the surprise of exactly no one among The Philadelphia Inquirer’s dwindling readership, the Inky has gone all-in on the so-called Pride Month, with three out of five articles in the opinion section relating to homosexual and transgender activism.

Philadelphia Inquirer screen capture, 6-3-23 at 10:00 AM EDT.

At Central Bucks, transphobic slurs are common and adults are unwilling to intervene

Many faculty members refuse to defend LGBTQ students from the words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill-intent that other students throw their way.

by Leo Burchell and Ben Busick, For The Inquirer | Updated Thursday, June 1, 2023 | 11:00 AM EDT

We are two trans students in the Central Bucks School District, which the American Civil Liberties Union has alleged is a “toxic environment” for LGBTQ students. In our time at Central Bucks, both of us have endured homophobic or transphobic bullying from our peers.

This bullying and discrimination has impacted our ability to learn, and Central Bucks does nothing about it.

One of us — Leo — came out as transgender and changed his name at the beginning of his senior year at Central Bucks West last September. He emailed all of his teachers about his pronouns and name. However, throughout the entire school year, one teacher consistently misgendered him, while only occasionally correcting themself.

It is hard to learn in a classroom when your teacher misgenders you to all the students present.

The authors have written this as though “Leo” Burchell is actually male, and the teachers and students must accept her as being male. It’s clear from their first paragraph, in which they stated that “both of us have endured homophobic or transphobic bullying from our peers,” that many of their fellow students have not accepted such as reality.

When entering one of the very few gender-neutral bathrooms for students to use, Leo was called a “tranny” by a student passing by. That gender-neutral bathroom also frequently lacks toilet paper, paper towels, or both. Another student hurled a homophobic slur at Leo as he handed out flyers about a protest before school one morning.

It is a legitimate complaint if the school, which has gone to the effort to establish ‘gender-neutral’ bathrooms, is not servicing them adequately. But that’s about the only legitimate complaint the authors made.

Central Bucks South, for Ben, has unfortunately not been much better. Homophobic and transphobic phrases are commonplace, and often targeted at Ben. They came out as nonbinary in their sophomore year of high school in 2021. Fortunately, many of their teachers have made a real effort to get their pronouns right and use them correctly. Their lovely AP Spanish teacher even taught Ben’s class (with Ben’s permission) about the Spanish word for nonbinary and the gender-neutral pronouns and conjugations of gendered words. She will probably never realize what an impact that simple gesture had.

“They” is, of course, a plural pronoun, making the short sentence, “They came out as nonbinary in their sophomore year of high school in 2021”, grammatically incorrect and jarring to the ears of an English-speaking person.

However, some faculty members do not try to integrate their pronouns into everyday language. These faculty often use strategies like, “I am just going to use your name so I don’t have to get your pronouns wrong,” which seems like an attempt to be inclusive at first glance but is really just a cop-out. Most transgender and nonbinary people would much rather someone make a mistake, correct themselves, and move on. (If someone with good, inclusive intentions makes a mistake, no big deal.)

Some faculty and most students at Central Bucks South, however, do not appear to have good intentions and rarely use Ben’s pronouns correctly. Even worse, many teachers witness students using the incorrect names and pronouns for transgender and nonbinary students — and do nothing about it.

If “some faculty and most students . . . do not appear to have good intentions” in this, as Miss Burchell and Mr Busick wrote, that is a clear indication that those faculty and students do not accept the claim that Miss Burchell is now a guy and Mr Busick is something other than a male. The authors have an absolute right to claim to be what they are, and to say so publicly, but just as their freedom of speech allows them to do that, the freedom of speech of other people allows other people to not only disagree with the authors’ claims, but say so publicly.

Many faculty members refuse to defend their LGBTQ students from the words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill-intent that other students throw their way. As such, we know many LGBTQ students who often dread going to school.

Sticks and stones, we were once told, could break our bones, but names would never hurt us. However, for Miss Burchell and Mr Busick, “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” do hurt, and they are demanding protection from those words. One wonders: if the homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered are to be protected from “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” aimed at their sexual orientation and identity, from what other “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” should other students, normal students, be protected, because “words, phrases, slurs, names, and ill intent” occur all the time in schools, for a myriad of reasons and just general dislike.

Perhaps they could submit a Hurt Feelings Report Form?

This is, to me, serious, because there are all sorts of attempts to legislate, censor, or otherwise ‘do something’ about ‘hate speech,’ and while the OpEd piece I selected is by high school seniors, there are (supposedly) serious adults who want the government to somehow take action against speech the left don’t like. The attempt to regulate and control speech is an attempt to regulate and control thought: if the government can somehow compel people to use language that agrees with the claims of the ‘transgendered,’ it becomes an effort to legitimize transgenderism, to push the thoughts of people who have a perfect right to reject the cockamamie claim that people can change their sex into avenues which accept that claim. Not just no, but Hell no!

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The real way to keep your kids out of trouble Doing the right things teaches your kids to do the right things

We have previously noted the homicide rate in St Louis, which, with an even 200 murders in 2022, and a Census Bureau estimated population of 286,578 as of July 1, 2022, yields a homicide rate of a whopping 69.79 per 100,000 population. When Philadelphia says that it’s the murder capital of the United States, St Louis laughs and says, “Hold my beer!”[1]With a Census Bureau estimated population of 1,567,258 as of July 1, 2022, and 516 murders that year, Philly’s homicide rate works out to a measly 32.92 per 100,000 population.

More specifically, with 45 of the homicide victims so far this year in the Gateway City being black males, black males in St Louis are bearing a homicide rate of a staggering 179.93 per 100,000 population.[2]The math: 286,578 total population, times 0.448, the percentage of the population listed as being black, times 0.487, the percentage of the population who are male, yields a black male population of … Continue reading

Now, why do I raise that subject? It is due to an article I saw in the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

Archbishop of St. Louis closes 35 parishes, reassigns 155 priests in Catholic church reorganization

by Blythe Bernhard | Pentecost Sunday, May 28, 2023

SHREWSBURY — The Archbishop of St. Louis will close 35 parishes and reassign 155 priests in the most sweeping reorganization of the Catholic church in St. Louis history.

After 18 months of waiting, Catholics learned on Saturday the fate of their priests and parishes in the downsizing of the archdiocese called “All Things New.”

The changes, which will reshape the archdiocese from 178 individual parishes into 134, were announced Saturday by Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski in a press conference and in a letter read by priests during vigil Mass.

“I wish these changes were not necessary, but it is what we are called to do at this moment,” Rozanski said Saturday.

The archbishop maintained that the plan affects the entire region, although nearly half of the closures are in north St. Louis and north St. Louis County and only one, St. John Bosco in Maryland Heights, is west of Interstate 270 in St. Louis County.

There’s more at the original.

One thing really jumped off the page at me: in the very areas in which St Louis was suffering the greatest number of murders, the “North Patrol,” are also the areas in which Mass attendance has declined so greatly that the Church is having to close parishes.

Let me be perfectly clear here: if you want your children not to grow up to be gang-bangers, not to be getting into situations in which gunfire or other serious violence is going to be the result, take them to church! Don’t send them to church, but take them to church. Don’t find excuses to sleep in, don’t say, “Oh, we’ll go next Sunday,” but take them to church every Sunday.

Some readers will complain that I have been overly simplistic in this, that there are so many other factors involved, but I really don’t see it that way. Taking your kids to church, every Sunday, teaches them that you believe religion and reverence are good and important things. Taking them to church every Sunday shows them that you are willing to make the effort to get out of bed yourself, to do the right thing. Taking them to church every Sunday exposes them to other kids and other families, also being taught the same lessons.

And taking the kids to church every Sunday encourages parents to do the right thing as well.

Is this the only thing that parents need to do? No, it isn’t, but it is the one thing which will help them get started, help them to do better, which does not require a lot of money or some complicated organizational effort. All you need to do is get the kids, your spouse, and yourself out of bed in the morning, and go. Yeah, it’s nice if you can drop some money in the collection basket, but if you don’t have the money to spare, the priest will still be happy to see you, other families will be glad you are there, and soon enough you will be able to manage to contribute something, anything, to the church. Doing the right thing very often brings the right rewards, even if it doesn’t always seem obvious.

References

References
↑1 With a Census Bureau estimated population of 1,567,258 as of July 1, 2022, and 516 murders that year, Philly’s homicide rate works out to a measly 32.92 per 100,000 population.
↑2 The math: 286,578 total population, times 0.448, the percentage of the population listed as being black, times 0.487, the percentage of the population who are male, yields a black male population of 62,524. 45 black male victims divided by 0.62524 equals 71.97236, divided by 146, the day of the year, and multiplied by 365 days in the year yields 179.93.
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We wicked Catholics and our Assault Rosaries!

My good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met her, but people can become good friends over Twitter these days — Christine Flowers says, in her Twitter biography, that she has an “open carry permit for (her) assault rosary.” That was a mocking reference to an article by Daniel Panneton in The Atlantic, originally entitled “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol“, about which I have previously written.

The Atlantic got plenty of pushback about it, and twice changed the article headline and subheading — the title “How Extremist Gun Culture Co-Opted the Rosary: The AR-15 is a sacred object among Christian nationalists. Now “radical-traditional” Catholics are bringing a sacrament of their own to the movement” isn’t shown in the screen captures tweeted by Taylor Marshall — imaged to the left, but the internet is forever.

And now we find out that some in the federal government, specifically the FBI, see Catholics, at least some Catholics, as evil subversives. From National Review:

FBI Internal Memo Warns against ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology’

by Brittany Bernstein | Wednesday, February 8, 2023 | 5:14 PM EST

The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday.

Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com. Continue reading →