Schools ramp up the war on traditional Christian beliefs

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Friday, July 23, 2010
JOSEPH SILVERMAN

The reputation of Notre Dame University is under attack for the second time this year because a group of students were funded by the school to attend the National Equality March for gay rights in Washington last Sunday. Pro-life and Catholic organizations criticized the school for inviting President Obama to speak at its commencement ceremony in May and receive an honorary degree.

Universities claim to be havens for diversity, but this political correctness does not guarantee freedom of thought. Tolerance is reserved for those who stick to the liberal line. Those who deviate from the approved set of views can expect to be set upon by angry student activists and reproving academic bureaucrats.

Two recent examples of "thought crime" illustrate the academy's low level of tolerance for divergent views. The University of Illinois fired nontenured adjunct professor Ken Howell from teaching and also from a job at the on-campus Catholic center for correctly stating Catholic doctrine on homosexuality. Mr. Howell had been teaching courses such as Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought at the school for nine years. During the spring semester, he explained in an e-mail to a student that according to Catholic doctrine, "A homosexual orientation is not morally wrong just as no moral guilt can be assigned to any inclination that a person has. However, based on natural moral law, the Church believes that homosexual acts are contrary to human nature and therefore morally wrong."

A hypercritical student radical determined this was "hate speech" and complained to religion department head Robert McKim, who fired Mr. Howell. Apparently, the professoriat will condone no deviations from political correctness regardless of the context or the facts. The unavoidable message to student activists is that they need not go to the trouble of engaging in intellectual exchanges with those who disagree with them; they simply can have the other side of a debate tossed off campus. the rest