One of the most intolerant places on earth today is the Western university. If you do not adhere to the reigning PC orthodoxy, you will be treated as a pariah – and worse. Woe to any conservatives or Christians who dare to stand against the secular left hegemony on campus.
Anti-Christian bigotry is alive and well in the West, but it is especially pronounced at our universities. Entire books have been penned documenting all this, and one never lacks up-to-date examples of all this. Many of you may have heard of one shocker that happened just recently.
At a Florida university the real face of secular left “tolerance” came shining through. One report puts it this way: “A Florida Atlantic University student has been suspended for refusing to trample on Jesus’ name. According to Ryan Rotela, a Mormon, his Intercultural Communications professor forced his students to write ‘Jesus’ on a piece of paper and then stomp on it as part of a ‘lesson in debating.’ Rotela refused, picked up the paper from the floor and placed it back on the table.
“’I’m not going to be sitting in a class having my religious rights desecrated,’ Rotela told WPEC. ‘I truly see this as I’m being punished.’ Though professor Deandre Poole was supposedly trying to teach the students ‘a lesson in debate,’ the student found the assignment to be offensive and insulting. ‘I said to the professor, “With all due respect to your authority as a professor, I do not believe what you told us to do was appropriate,”’ Rotela said. ‘I believe it was unprofessional and I was deeply offended by what you told me to do.’ The Boca Raton, Fla.-based university, which is defending the professor, later suspended the student.”
Wow, this really does take the cake. What next? Will students be forced to denounce their faith or be expelled from the university? Will they be fed to the lions or sent to re-education camps? Oh yeah, I forgot: most universities today are re-education camps.
And don’t take my word for it. As one famous US professor, Richard Rorty admitted: “I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”
It is open season on Christianity at most Western campuses today, and this is just one of far too many examples. Oh, and just imagine what would have happened if these students were instructed to stomp on an image of Muhammad. Somehow I don’t think these spineless wonders would dare to make their students do something like that.
But there was a bit of good news here. After a national outcry at this outrage and abuse of power, the school eventually backed down. As another report notes, “FAU has now issued a formal apology. ‘There will be no punishment,’ said Hiram Sasser, Rotela’s attorney. ‘They are wiping the record clean for Ryan. They are reinstating him for a plan to complete the course without that professor.’
“Sasser, the director of litigation for the Liberty Institute, told Fox News that the university was deeply apologetic. ‘The university apologized profusely,’ Sasser said. ‘One of the university officials told us lots of people were offended by the assignment and they were very sorry about that’.”
But of course this whole despicable incident should never have taken place in the first place. And this intolerant bully of a professor should not be teaching there. Indeed, he is the one who should have been disciplined, not the hapless student.
As Christopher White comments, “Instead of teaching what is relevant—understanding the ideas and movements that have shaped history and will shape our future—college campuses often do irreparable damage to families and societies that will be built on the rocky foundation known as secularism.
“For the likes of Ryan Rotela and the other marginalized voices on these campuses, theirs is a journey marked by persecution and ridicule. The idea of a university in which the exchange of free ideas can take place has become a relic of the past. Instead, classes such as Rotela’s ‘Intercultural Communication’ continually prove that the only acceptable form of communication for those who might disagree is silence.”
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Yes, so much for tolerance, openness, and genuine intellectual pursuits. As Ann Coulter put it in Godless: “Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left’s madrassas. . . . At least the crazy Muslims get funding from Saudi Arabia for their madrassas. Liberals force normal Americans to pay for their religious schools.”
Or as Dennis Prager wrote in Still the Best Hope: “Just as the purpose of Christian seminaries is to produce committed Christians, the primary purpose of most Western universities is, consciously or not, to produce committed secular leftists. The major difference between them is that Christian seminaries declare their purpose, and Western universities do not.”
And Mark Steyn was quite right to say this in After America: “The massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite – its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity – for the price of which you wind up in Hock.”
Sadly the nasty experience which Ryan Rotela had to endure is just par for the course. And it will only get worse, unless we wake up to these realities and start doing something about it.
http://www.charismanews.com/us/38813-university-suspends-student-for-refusing-to-stomp-on-jesus-name
http://www.gopusa.com/theloft/2013/03/27/student-told-to-stomp-jesus-now-receives-apology/
http://www.tothesource.org/3_27_2013/3_27_2013.htm
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