The University of Illinois has fired an adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism after a student accused the instructor of engaging in hate speech by saying he agrees with the church’s teaching that homosexual sex is immoral.
The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his academic freedom. He also lost his job at an on-campus Catholic center.
Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam.
“Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY,” he wrote in the e-mail. “In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same.”
An unidentified student sent an e-mail to religion department head Robert McKim on May 13, calling Howell’s e-mail “hate speech.” The student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous.
“Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing,” the student wrote. “Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another.”
Howell didn’t say that he hated homosexuals, only that he agreed with Catholic doctrine that their behavior is unnatural and therefore immoral. You can agree with that or not, but the existence of this doctrine is a non-controversial fact. Religion students may not like to be exposed to such facts, but that doesn’t change the existence of them. In fact, the only “hate” on display is the anonymous student’s hatred for what the professor said. Voltaire weeps.
Wrath is one of the seven deadly sins, as is sloth. If sensitive students learn of these facts, will the wrathful and the slothful combine to call such a point of view hateful?
Because I’d like tickets.
I predict he’ll get his job back….
http://www.thefire.org/
“natural laws of man.” Those don’t exist. Man discovers the laws of nature, he doesn’t make them up. The man’s education is truly pathetic.
Perhaps he misspoke or intended for ‘natural laws’ to imply ‘God’s laws’.
However, your point is well taken. We discover and are taught God’s laws.
Haven’t read Voltaire yet. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
Mongo, it was the pathetic whiner who used the phrase “natural laws of man.”
The instructor, being penniless, has little to fight with, but he should accuse, harangue, insult, ridicule and humiliate every pogue who went along with the gay pipsqeak’s complaing. The lesson of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn fighting against the Canadian bully pulpits is clear: admit nothing, deny everything and always make counter-accusations. Refuse to fight the way they fight best and start hurling the bricks right back. Challenge their authority to question the professor and his teaching; challenge the trustees with whether this is the university they want; forward the facts of the case to every alumni group you can find and ask them to withhold any financial donation until the university rights this wrong, or better yet, donate to his legal fund or a foundation dedicated to maintaining free speech on their alma mater.
Candide
And yet some states, the Federal government, and a recent SCOTUS appointee believe that a stroke of the pen to create laws protecting such immoral behavior somehow changes the fact that it is still immoral. Sad.
Well, I guess it’s time to write another letter to the new President – the new U of Illinois President, that is.
And they want us alums to step up our financial support for the University now that the State is bankrupted.
Same sort of brilliant logic Hollywood TV & movie lefties use when they regularly insult 50% of their potential audience that pays the salaries which support their indulgent life-styles, Flat. My current fave is an interview uber-lefty trust-fund baby Julia Louise-Dryfuss gave in which she said: “I could never date or marry a Republican, I’m too morally centered.” LOL. Michael Savage is right. Liberalism IS a mental disease!
I should have added: “They just can’t help themselves.”
WE do have preview now VX
Dreyfuss is an alumna of Holton Arms, the most prestigious private school for the right people of Washington, DC. She is a trust fund baby all the way.
I have a lot of friends who are offended by lots of things the state of Illinois and/or its citizens have done in recent years.
Can I get all those sorry SOBs from Illinois fired for saying or doing things that my friends consider to be hateful?
Of course, Illinois Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speeches are filled with nothing but love for all mankind, and cannot possibly offend anyone.
Perhaps the only solution is to pray for lightning bolts to smite the evil ones. It would be a ferocious storm season to accomplish all that needed to be done!
QM,
I suggust a little research before throwing a rock like that at the professor and his education. You have over 2000 years of thought and philosophy working against you.
Respectfully,
Dust
Dust, here is the quote again. Note who wrote it, and who I was talking about:
“‘Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing,’ the student wrote. ‘Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another.’”
Natural laws of man do not exist. We merely discover them. The students education is truly pathetic.
QM, Sorry. See my last below. Best,
BTW, this stuff is going on in Canada and in the EU to persons who challenge the conventional politically correct thought on homosexuality, same sex marriage and abortion. No offense intended Michelle.
Dust,
I think QM quoted the student, not the Professor. The student is the one who needs to explain what the heck “Natural Laws of Man” means. He used it, not the teacher. I am not a Catholic, but at least I can cross U of I off the list of potential schools for my children. Have to find a school with intelligent grown ups in charge. Perhaps becoming impossible, but the oldest is only 13, so there is still time.
subguy, there haven’t been intelligent adults in charge in Champaign since the early 50s. Nothing but uber rabid leftists in faculty and Admin since tenure of President David Dodds Henry. Most people don’t think of in the middle of mid-western cornfields Uof I when they think of far left schools, but Illinois is right up there with the best of them except for the student body. They’ve resisted the pod-people syndrome somehow–all their far-left brethren from HS gravitating to the likes of Wisc., Harvard, Berkley, Oberlin or the old seven sisters.
There are more of us conservatives than you would think, amongst us UW-Madison grads. I do realise that the mental image brought forth by “Badger”, is misleadingly that of a soft, cuddly animal, but except for the liberal arts types, who, unfortunately do culturally dominate on campus, there are many, many Badgers who are Badgers, and not Left Wing Weasels.
My bad. In Dust and ashes I repent, QM.
American Power tracked-back with, ‘The Destructive Power of Hate Speech Censorship’.
My son just recently graduated from U of I. But he got an engineering degree. In engineering you learn that it doesn’t matter whether the work force has the proper diversity or whether everyone feels good about what they’ve done – use the wrong grade of steel or make a mistake with the design and the bridge falls down.
In engineering you learn that there ARE objective truths.
Climateology (sp?) — not so much.
A good read on that is: “I Chose Freedom” by a man who’s father fought the revolution and he was part of the collectivization effort, and an engineer in a pipe making factory. Great stories about too hard steel breaking the equipment being blamed on the workers making pipe. Saboteurs, as it were, off to Siberia!, not to mention the idiocy of centrally planning the economy and glove quotas met….all as left handed ones.
He defected in WWII, when he was sent to the US on exchange. History…we do repeat it, don’t we?
Shows how far people are willing to go to make themselves feel offended about anything or nothing. That prof should get his job back, the student should be kicked out, and those who fired him should be sacked.
In a perfect world, Joe. But then, in a perfect world, those idiots would be begging for pocket change on street corners, not running institutions of higher learning…
Can’t we strive for perfection one supercilious thug at a time?
Read “Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom if you haven’t yet.
Sun Tzu warned to know yourself and your enemy. Right now we refuse, out of political principle, to learn about either. Not a good situation.
And for anyone making lists of schools I can offer from personal experience to scratch UCLA right off. (Even the engineering department where I went, running on name recognition only.) Not that that’s probably a surprise to anyone . . .
Off Topic? Maybe but in the big picture of what has happened to the U.S. in the last thirty or so years, worth putting down here.
Anyway, something most of you won’t go for, but posted here for a few that might.
Want to sabotage the liberal traitorous media, especially the lefty Hollywood idiots?
Want sound values and want to be a part of getting them out to America and the world?
Want to be a Citizen Producer of quality pro-American movies?
Go here and check it out:
http://www.declarationentertainment.com/
It could be the best money you ever spend for your kids and grand kids. I’m poor but will forgo $10.00 bucks a month so that American ideals and beliefs can be rebuilt for our children and grand children.
Papa Ray
Kinda sorta on the same general topic, brought to you by none other than Maxine Waters, (drum roll) I give you the Diversity TSAR!: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/10/financial-overhaul-provision-promote-diversity-hiring-federal-agencies-stirs/?test=latestnews
In the financial overhaul bill that is on the cusp of becoming law, House Democrats have included a largely overlooked provision that would create diversity czars to promote racial and gender hiring in federal agencies — a move that has sparked concerns about racial quotas, government waste and charges that Democrats are attempting to politicize the Federal Reserve.
The bill would establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion at each federal financial services agency to “ensure equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic and gender diversity” of the work force and senior management.
The diversity czars would also aim to “increase the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts” of each agency and conduct “an assessment” of those goals.
To quote that famous philosopher, Mr. C. Brown, “Good Grief!”
Engineering Schools are a holdout against the insanity the universities in this country. Even in the hard science departments you will find an increasingly insane faculty (not true every where, but it is encroaching).
We Engineers, however, have the oppressive presence of reality in our lives. If I design a bridge that collapses when a truck drives across, I am in very deep manure, to put it mildly.
OTH, I had an English Lit instructor during a discussion on Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” as why we don’t use concrete to pave highways anymore. I said, point blank that we do and she could see quite a bit of concrete pavement if she ever drove around Nashville 90 miles away. She politely listened, then repeated the question. The entire class were Civil Engineering Majors and the only response she got was mine. That, alas, is the sort of people that get hired in the “Liberal Arts” these days.
So, what was the English Lit teacher’s reason for believing they no longer pave roads with concrete — the horrors of concrete roads Steinbeck described?
She obviously never spent any time in Arizona…
Or much of anywhere else. When I was in Ohio, ODOT paved more than 10 miles of US 50 with Portland Cement Concrete. Most pavements in this country are Asphalt, but most states have places where Concrete is preferred.
She just couldn’t let go of Steinbeck’s description of bad concrete pavements.
In the way way back the expression around here was get on Interstate whatever…”and its cocrete all the way”…no so now replacement paving now appears to be all Asphalt…seems to last longer in the NE…who knows?…then again this time the Asphalt Paving lobby might have outfoxed the Portland Cement Concrete lobby( the big dogs/winners in the fifties)…payback is a bi*ch. Best
Just from general observation over a life-time, but seems as if all new interstate construction is always concrete, with replacement/repave in asphalt, no? (or most anyway, I seem to remember some new Inter-state const. in eastern Ky mountains near Hazard back in late 70s was done in asphalt. Couldn’t be because that was ‘coal country’ or anything, eh?
)
Here in WI, it tends to be concrete for major roads, and asphalt for secondary ones. Concrete seems to hold up better in our mild, dry, winters.
That was the Daniel Boone Parkway, VX. They’ve changed the name of it, though.
The pavement of a highway will depend on the state DOT and what they tend to want. Smooth ride is generally the criteria, and it’s much easier to get with Asphalt than with concrete. I was on the section of US 50 in SE Ohio that was paved with concrete about this time last year and it started about as smooth as Asphalt, but the joints are starting to fault from the settlement at the joints. Between joints it’s as good as it ever was.
Each type of paement has it’s weaknesses. Asphalt ruts after a time, while differential settlement at the joints causes faulting and the irritating noise and “porpoising” when the faulting is bad.
Technically, both Asphalt and Portland Cement pavements are concrete. What we normally call concrete is actually Portland Cement Concrete. Asphalt is Asphalt Cement Concrete.
QM, to quote the late, great Pat Paulson “Picky, picky, picky.”
I normally call PCC just concrete, like most people. Same with ACC and Asphalt. I Southeast Ohio we often called Asphalt Hot Mix since the stuff has to be pretty hot when you put it down.
So I’m not picky. But as soon as I’m chief civility policeman here, I’m gonna ban you if you don’t abjectly apologize for describing that cookout you didn’t invite Mongo, VX and me to. Then comes penance. I’ll discuss that with the civility Politburo and announce your execution, er…sentence after that.
I did a quick paper on the 1st Amendment during my high school days. There is one quote that has always stuck with me, although I’m a bit hazy on who the author what, what with old age setting in. Anyways, it was “The price we pay for freedom of expression is that some people will be offended.”
It unfortunate that the student who complained is of the set that knows that they will get their way if they whine about hate speech. I sounds to me like the professor was just present the facts as he knew them, however distasteful they may be. He was also honest enough to not try and avoid a highly controversial, very high profile subject.
The professor sounds like a pretty open guy when it comes to his interactions with his students. The offended kid should have seen this as an opening to have an honest discussion about their conflicting viewpoints. instead he chose go with “Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!”
On the subject of the integrity of engineering schools vs. other disciplines. A couple of years ago I attended interviews for the finalists for Dean of Engineering at George Washington U (my alma mater). One candidate (who ended up being selected), discussed the issue of tenure and getting profs who were past their prime to retire. He described how at UT-Austin (where he was an Associate Dean), the university had a performance review process (I believe done by peers). There were two results that I recall. The first was that when confronted with constructive criticism, most tenured professors chose to either take corrective action to improve their performance or to retire. The second was that the evaluations in the engineering school tended to be tougher and more likely to recommend corrective action than in other schools.
At the same time, I think most of us who are engineers recognize that being objective is not the same thing as seeing things as black and white (which is a frequent characterization and pushes a hot button with me). Design is almost always a series of compromises and involves trade offs and accepting some level of risk. That’s why we put safety factors and margins in structural and other designs.
I think the American university system is following the mainstream media down the rat-hole. They’ve created insular environments of orthodoxy for themselves, and don’t realize, or don’t seem to mind that they’ve greatly reduced their value to a large majority of their potential students. Eventually, demand for “fair and balanced” education will give rise to serious competition and the “mainstream universities” will collapse under their own weight.
Of course, you could also argue (rightly, I think) that the universities lead the media down the rat-hole, and the media merely collapsed first.