Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

…at the University of Illinois:

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.

After all if you have believing Catholics teaching about Catholic belief then you tend to hear actual Catholic belief rather than pseudo Catholicism and we can’t have that, too dangerous.

This is an illustration where the whole idea of “hate speech” goes. It’s simply repression because “hate speech” can be defined as any speech the administration hates, and apparently Centuries of Catholic belief is hated by this administration.

There is a lot of commentary on the net

Right Wing News:

So much for schools that foster intellectual exploration and truth.

But that is the left-wing educational system we’ve been saddled with since the turn of the last century, isn’t it? Only atheism, socialism, leftism, communism, anti-Americanism, feminism, homoerotica and a fascistic quashing of free speech… only these are acceptable doctrines for our schools to disseminate, of course.

Neptunus Lex:

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.

The Blog Prof:

Is this what liberals call ‘tolerance?’ Is this what gay activists call tolerance?

American Power notes the professor is an author of four books on religion and concludes:

It’s obvious that Professor Howell is eminently qualified to discuss the religious morality of homosexuality, and why in fact should it be surprising that questions of this nature would arise in classes on the Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought? The man was doing his job.

And at Gateway Pundit guest blogger John Burns says this:

Of course, the irony here is the constantly disingenuous, pathetic overtures socialist progressives make to free speech and rigorous debate. One cannot escape college without hearing about the Catholic Church’s assault on Copernicus’ and Galileo’s notion of a heliocentric universe. “This,” as they love to pontificate, “is the perfect example of how religion kills the free association of ideas, roots out free thinking, and persecutes unfavored points of view. With religion, dogmatism and sacred cows stampede rationality.”

Well, the anti-religion crowd has nonetheless cultivated dogmatism and sacred cows of their own. Socialist pundits will dismiss this, arguing that anti-Tyranny students often try to get their profs fired.

The difference, of course, is that in this instance the professor was not making assimilation of his ideas a prerequisite for passing the course. Offering up your ideas, and forcing students to internalize them are two different things…Socialist professors being guilty of the latter, and with high frequency.

This is in fact the norm and part of the job description of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particularly thus we will give the last word to Christ via John 15:18-23

“If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you. Remember the word I spoke to you, ‘No slave is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. And they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin; but as it is they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me also hates my Father.

That doesn’t mean you don’t object to injustice, particularly as an American, it means that you aren’t surprised by it.