Category: Cancel Culture

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Virginia School District Pays $575K Settlement for Firing Teacher Over Refusal to Use Transgender Pronouns

A Win for Religious Freedom.

A Virginia school district has agreed to pay $575,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by Peter Vlaming, a former teacher fired for refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred pronouns on religious grounds. The settlement includes damages, attorney fees, and the removal of Vlaming’s dismissal from his record. Vlaming’s legal team argued that the firing violated his First Amendment rights. The case highlights tensions between religious freedom and policies on gender identity in schools.

Details.

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Embrace, Don’t Affirm

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Flying the ‘True Colors’ Flag Now

Progressives’ response to Hamas’s atrocities reveals that they never believed in their own dogma.

Woke dogma, that is…

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile.

Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that“neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one?

For more than a decade now, our universities, our media, our HR departments, and our celebrities have terrorized us with a bunch of vicious dogmas that, it turns out, they never believed in for a moment. In the name of “diversity” and “inclusion” and “equity” and any other abstract concept that might plausibly be recruited to the obscurantists’ side, Americans were asked to subordinate their freedom, their conversations, and their consciences to the personal preferences of a handful of unelected arbiters of taste. And then, one terrible day in October, a real barbarity was staged, and, within a few hours of the rules being applied to its apologists, the whole enterprise was revealed to be a brittle sham. 

It has been about the Far Left gaining Power all along…and the silencing of those who disagree with their worldview.

Read the whole thing.

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Intersectionality & The Age of Outrage

If you’ve ever wondered about the ‘seed-bed’ of today’s cancel culture, with its intolerant ideologies (e.g., gender ideology), Jonathan Haidt has some insight….

The article, titled “The Age of Outrage,” written by Jonathan Haidt, explores the current socio-political climate in the United States, particularly focusing on the heightened polarization and “outrage” permeating the country and its universities. Haidt employs the concept of “the fine-tuned universe” from cosmology to draw a parallel with the delicate balance required to maintain a stable, liberal democracy, particularly in a diverse and secular society. He suggests that certain “settings” or conditions must be finely adjusted to facilitate stable political life, a concept he extends to label as “the fine-tuned liberal democracy.”

In thinking about the evolution of human beings, he emphasizes our tribal nature and inclination towards group living and intergroup conflict. He suggests that while we can live in large, multi-ethnic secular liberal democracies, it requires a careful balance to maintain stability. Haidt also explores the concept of intersectionality in modern identity politics, critiquing it for its tendency to categorize and create an “us vs. them” mentality, which he views as antithetical to the unity and common purpose needed in a liberal democracy. He contrasts this with the identity politics of the civil rights era, which he perceives as having been more integrative and unifying.

Haidt identifies several factors that have contributed to the current state of polarization, including the absence of common enemies, changes in media consumption, increased diversity and immigration, and shifts in political and academic climates. He particularly criticizes the new identity politics and intersectionality taught in universities, arguing that it fosters a divisive and combative environment that is contrary to the foundational principles of the United States.

Feel free to explore the article directly for a deeper understanding: The Age of Outrage.

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