Wednesday, November 20, 2019


Conservatives Are Now Getting Expelled From the Scientific Community Over LGBT Issues

LGBT activists have weaponized two scientific societies to cut off a major Mormon university from their international community of scientists. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, D.C., and the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Colorado pulled job ads from Brigham Young University (BYU) after facing complaints over BYU's Honor Code, which prohibits homosexual conduct among students and staff. This is unlikely to stop with the AGU and GSA and is likely to lead to blacklisting far more schools than just BYU.

LGBT activists complained that the geological societies had listed a job posting from BYU on their job boards. While the societies originally stood up to pressure, they eventually caved as the activists went public. The job ads for a BYU tenure-track position were posed online in mid-September. The societies took them down two weeks later, on October 1, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. GSA, which has 27,000 members worldwide, refunded BYU the $800 it paid to post the job. AGU has 62,000 members in 144 countries.

"AGU has always encouraged and fostered a diverse geoscience community throughout its history because we believe—and repeatedly see—that diversity and inclusion are essential to advancing science," Billy Williams, the union's vice president of ethics, diversity, and inclusion, wrote in a statement. "Since the job posting from BYU referenced its Honor Code as a requirement of employment, which conflicts with our policy, we removed the job posting from our website."

AGU's own Code of Conduct prohibits members from "engaging in discrimination, harassment, bullying," and more. "As a statement of principle, AGU rejects discrimination and harassment by any means, based on factors such as ethnic or national origin, race, religion, ... gender identity, sexual orientation," and more.

In other words, Williams effectively accused BYU of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But the BYU Honor Code does not so discriminate. The Honor Code merely forbids homosexual behavior — explicitly distinguished from homosexual feelings or attraction. "One's stated same-gender attraction is not an Honor Code issue," the code states. "However, the Honor Code requires all members of the university community to manifest a strict commitment to the law of chastity." Prohibited conduct "includes not only sexual relations between members of the same sex, but all forms of physical intimacy that give expression to homosexual feelings."

This nuanced position would allow openly homosexual people to attend and work for BYU, but it would still prevent them from homosexual activity, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers a sin.

Ellen Alexander, a doctoral candidate in geology at UCLA who describes herself as an LGBTQ scientist, condemned the job postings as "inherently discriminatory." A member of both AGU and GSA, she told the Tribune that she was using their job boards to find employment.

"It really hurts me as a member of those organizations and as a young scientist to see the BYU ads," Alexander said, suggesting that the job posts victimized her. "Science is already unrepresentative of racial and ethnic minorities and gender and sexual minorities. It’s important that we not make it even harder for those folks to get jobs."

Alexander and her partner, Peter Martin, complained about the job postings to the societies. "I don't see why someone's sexual preference should have any bearing on their employment," Martin told the Tribune. After AGU and GSA refused to take down the posting, Alexander and Martin look to social media, mobilizing like-minded members to ramp up the pressure.

"If the Honor Code included the phrase 'blacks need not apply,' would the ad stay up? What about 'Jews are not allowed on the BYU campus'? Is that acceptable?" Martin posted on Facebook. While he acknowledged that LGBTQ people are not excluded from the campus or from applying, he insisted that faculty members would not be able to act on their attractions and keep their jobs. He claimed that it effectively stops any same-sex married couples from applying.

Alexander and Martin suggested that such a policy is beyond the pale and that religious freedom and intellectual diversity do not justify working with an organization with such a policy. "That ideology does not deserve an equal seat at the table. It’s not a belief. It’s discrimination," Alexander said.

Jennifer Glass, an associate professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, wrote that keeping the ads online equates to "endorsing homophobia."

AGU caved to these attacks, but the union published a statement from three BYU professors pushing back on the removal of the job posting. Benjamin Abbott and Jamie Jensen, who work in the College of Life Sciences, and Jani Radebaugh in the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, argued that pulling the job posting quashes intellectual diversity.

These BYU professors — who are also members of AGU — did not defend the Honor Code or hiring policies but they did warn that excluding institutions like BYU can do real damage to the scientific community.

"Liberals and conservatives alike have been shown to dismiss scientific evidence based on political allegiance, meaning that our public credibility depends on good science from diverse scientists," they wrote. "However, diversity is more than just looking different or even being different. ... Ideological diversity requires a willingness to be challenged and the intellectual humility to admit that the other side may have something to offer."

The professors lamented that "some academic fields have lost most of their ideological diversity over the past 50 years because of a combination of self-selection, hostile atmosphere, and discrimination. ... Though it is difficult to find unbiased data, there is strong evidence that conservatives are substantially underrepresented in the geosciences and academia generally compared with the overall population."

"A lack of ideological diversity not only hurts those who are excluded; it decreases opportunity to improve arguments and examine blind spots in the majority," the professors warned. "If our largely liberal community decides not to rub shoulders with conservatives, we will be poorly prepared to translate our science to the public, lobby legislators to increase research funding, and effectively inform the creation and application of policy."

Ideological discrimination can also prop up other forms of discrimination, they warned. "Independent of party affiliation, ideology correlates with socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic identity. Working-class, rural, black, Hispanic, and Muslim populations are more religious or socially conservative on average than whites in the United States. Intentional or unintentional exclusion of conservatives will disproportionately disadvantage those groups."

"If we require progressive policies of all participating institutions, we would exclude many religious schools that have restrictive honor codes, including Baylor and most Jewish and Islamic universities," the professors explained.

One of the professors, Benjamin Abbott, told The Tribune that the decision to pull the job posting was made without any dialogue with BYU. Rather, it came after activists spoke out on Twitter, a platform that very poorly represents the American public. "This decision to cut off a group because of their beliefs on social issues is counterproductive to social and scientific progress," he warned.

Indeed, the decision is bad for science, as it cuts off diverse perspectives that might lead to research in new directions following different paradigms. Yet this move from geological societies is terrifying for millions of socially conservative Americans — and the dozens of religious institutions with policies similar to that of BYU.

This is far from the first time LGBT activists have targeted BYU. In 2016, LGBT groups including Athlete Ally and the National Center for Lesbian Rights pushed for the Big 12 athletic conference to exclude BYU. In April 2018, a political science group apologized for holding its conference at BYU. That organization later claimed its decision to let BYU host the conference had a chilling effect on the LGBT scholars who participated.

The Salvation Army has also suffered from this kind of blacklisting. Just this week, singer Ellie Goulding threatened to pull out of the halftime show for a Dallas Cowboys game because the game supports the Salvation Army, which she condemned as "anti-LGBTQ." Activists have also demonized Chick-fil-A for funding the Salvation Army. LGBT activists convinced a property manager to close the first Chick-fil-A in Britain, declaring the whole country off-limits to the fast-food chain because it supports the Salvation Army.

Why such animus against the Salvation Army? The famous charity is also a church, and it abides by Christian doctrine on sexuality, prohibiting sexual activity outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. In other words, it holds its members to the same sexual ethics as the BYU Honor Code.

BYU and the Salvation Army do not advocate politically for marriage to be defined as between one man and one woman, they merely require their own members and employees to follow their religious teachings. They should be able to do this, and it should not be considered beyond the pale.

Yet thanks to LGBT activist groups and organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which accuses mainstream conservative and Christian organizations of being "hate groups" like the Ku Klux Klan, there is a growing movement to demonize anyone who dares uphold traditional sexual morality.

The removal of BYU's job posting shows that this demonization has spread to scientific societies — a kind of organization that should be most open to affiliating with all types of colleges and universities pursuing scientific research.

If scientific societies exclude BYU over its Honor Code, they will have to exclude all other conservative religious colleges and universities. How long before any graduate from these schools is blacklisted, prevented from getting a job in the scientific community?

In fact, earlier this year, Yale University decided to yank all funding from Yale students and graduates who chose to work for organizations that "discriminate" against LGBT people.

Academia exists to promote free inquiry, and scientific societies exist to pursue scientific discovery. Yet it appears that some universities and scientific societies are putting identity politics ahead of the pursuit of truth. This is grotesque and tragic, but also terrifying to the millions of Americans who disagree. When did science become part of the Church of Inclusivity?

SOURCE 





The Arithmetic of Emotional and Social Education
  
When a few close friends told me what happened at their back-to-school night in suburban Maryland, I almost didn’t believe them.

Parents gathered in their first-graders’ classroom, excited to figure out which artwork on the wall belonged to their child. Instead, they received a lecture. They were curtly notified that math and English would be taking a back seat this year.

The school’s new top priority: social and emotional learning.

I was floored. Since when are math and English considered “second-tier priorities”? Since when did parents begin delegating the development of their children’s personalities and values to the public school system?

We send children to school to prepare them for success in real life. We expose them to a variety of subjects — like math, English, art, and science — to help children explore possible career paths while learning practical life skills.

We teach children history and civics to help them understand freedom and the American story, where we have come from, and where we are going. At least we used to.

This was my experience in elementary school. But as my husband and I eagerly await the arrival of our first baby in December, I shudder to think about what the school experience will look like five years from now. I worry my children won’t receive the same quality education that I did.

The truth is, this elementary school in Maryland is rather normal compared to the left-wing agendas pushed by public school districts in other parts of the country. The Seattle public school district is planning to add ethnic studies into its K-12 math curriculum in an effort to “rehumanize” math. What does that even mean?

If this radical proposal is approved, teachers would have to ask students questions like, “How have math and science been used to oppress and marginalize people of color?” and “Who holds power in a math classroom?”

Teaching addition and subtraction would likely be second-tier priorities during these indoctrination sessions. To think — we were already worried about Common Core math.

In some California school districts, students are required to write manifestos to school officials listing reform demands, write “breakup letters” with toxic masculinity, perform social-justice campaigns and protests, and teach younger students about white privilege, systematic oppression, and implicit bias.

Parents have filed complaints with North Carolina schools for handing out white-privilege flyers and making young students fill out “diversity inventory” worksheets. Good luck trying to explain heteronormativity to an eight-year-old.

No wonder teachers are having a hard time squeezing math and English lessons into the school day. Our public schools are not preparing America’s rising generation of professionals and innovators. Instead, they are grooming the next generation of Democratic voters.

These taxpayer-funded initiatives are almost too absurd to believe. However, they are real, and they present a serious threat to our children’s education. Parents must take them seriously and fight back with everything we have.

Parents need to take an active role in PTA, PTO, and school-board activities to prevent our public school curriculums from being designed around progressive talking points rather than textbooks. I know my husband and I will.

Teachers are tasked with preparing our children for the future, but parents are responsible to hold these school districts accountable and keep them honest and transparent. We need to take a stand. Public schools are beholden to the taxpayers who fund them, not the other way around.

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Australia: The campus fight over Beijing’s influence

Clashes between pro- and anti-Hong Kong demonstrators have renewed scrutiny over China’s role in western universities

Drew Pavlou is an unlikely threat to the Chinese Communist party. The 20-year-old arts student at Australia’s University of Queensland has never even been to the country. But his decision to organise a campus demonstration in support of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters has sparked a diplomatic incident between Canberra and Beijing and put him on a collision course with the Chinese authorities.

The July 24 protest turned violent, with clashes between pro- and anti-Beijing students. The organisers were subsequently accused by China’s consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, of being “separatists” and “anti-China activists”.

Mr Pavlou has lodged a police complaint against Mr Xu alleging that the consul-general’s statement exposed the young student to death threats. It claims that the statement is evidence of efforts by Beijing and its network of foreign representatives to silence critics and limit freedom of speech on campuses.

The arts student is also urging the university to close its Confucius Institute, a Chinese language and cultural centre on campus funded by Beijing, and reverse its decision to appoint Mr Xu as an adjunct professor.

A separate legal action lodged by Mr Pavlou against Mr Xu will be heard on November 22 at Brisbane Magistrates Court. The student has asked the court to issue a form of restraining order against Mr Xu that would require him to stop any activity that threatens to cause harm to Mr Pavlou. But the senior Chinese official has not yet said whether he will attend court or defend the action.

The spillover of tensions generated by the Hong Kong protests at colleges in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and elsewhere has intensified a global debate about Beijing’s influence at western universities where annual enrolment of Chinese students doubled to 869,000 in the decade to 2017, according to the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney-based think-tank. It is a concern that extends beyond Beijing’s monitoring of its own citizens on overseas campuses: bleeding into areas such as research and development and cyber security.

“Australian academic independence is being bought by the Chinese government,” says Mr Pavlou. “Beijing exercises so much financial leverage over our universities that it can stifle all criticism of the Chinese government on campus.”

The university strongly rejects Mr Pavlou’s criticisms, saying it is committed to free speech and insists its ties with Mr Xu and the Confucius Institute are entirely appropriate. But the violent scenes have alarmed Australia’s conservative government, which rebuked Mr Xu for his comments and has created a foreign interference task force staffed by security service personnel and academics to monitor the university sector.

It is expected to issue guidelines by the end of November on how to strengthen cyber security on campuses, reduce the risk of sensitive military and dual-use intellectual property being obtained by the Chinese government or military, and safeguard academic freedom at colleges.

Canberra’s focus on rooting out foreign influence, first in politics and now universities, has angered Beijing and alarmed some Australian academics, who warn it risks labelling all Chinese students as spies, promoting xenophobia and causing irreparable damage to bilateral relations, with two-way trade worth A$213bn last year. But critics counter that universities are turning a blind eye to Beijing’s alleged interference on campus because the sector has become dependent on Chinese money.

“This is a wake-up call for all of us, whether it be government, the university sector or business,” says Dan Tehan, Australia’s education minister. “We need to understand the best way we can deal with the threat [of foreign interference].”

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