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Deviant Speech Defined

When Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich fired a transportation official at the urging of gay rights groups, he was replaying an act of capitulation that has already taken place in education circles. “Homosexual behavior, in my view, is deviant,” Metro Transit authority appointee Robert J. Smith said on an after-hours cable TV broadcast. “I’m a Catholic,” Smith explained.

“The real issue here is the right of government employees to voice their religious convictions with impunity,” William Donahue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights says. “Moreover, Robert Smith’s remark is so innocuous that, up until recently, every sociology textbook on social problems listed homosexuality as deviant behavior.”

“For wholly ideological reasons, there is an effort to normalize what psychologists have long referred to as inversion.”

Inverted Aid

Now college students can win college scholarships for this inverted behavior. The Point Foundation in San Francisco gives out about $30,000 apiece, direct and in-kind, to about 30 gay, lesbian and transgender students a year nationwide.

Castro Convertible

You would think that an organization as famously sensitive as the ACLU would be particularly leery of repeating totalitarian propaganda of foreign dictators to refugees of those brutal dictatorships and their loved ones. Think again.

“The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal judge to stop the Miami-Dade County school district from removing a series of children’s books from its libraries, including a volume about Cuba that depicts smiling children in communist uniforms,” the Associated Press reports. “The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association argued in a lawsuit filed in U. S. District Court in Miami yesterday [June 21] that the school board should add material with alternative viewpoints rather than remove books that could be offensive.”

“Last week, the board voted 6-3 to remove ‘Vamos a Cuba’ and its English language version, ‘A Visit to Cuba,’ from 33 schools, stating the books were inappropriate for young readers because of inaccuracies and omissions about life in the communist nation.”

Publishers Weekly and the School Library Journal raved about the book. The parent who brought the initial complaint had been a political prisoner in Castro’s Cuba.

Library Cards rated X

Official library associations have odd triggers. The American Library Association has not had a problem with books with rather graphically sexual cartoons in school libraries in places like Fayetteville, Arkansas. On the other hand, ALA officers are in a dither over the First Lady addressing the organization’s annual convention.

Public School Predators Return

Education officials subject homeschooling parents to intense scrutiny to make sure they qualify as instructors of their own children, but how well do these administrators examine and review their own staff of public school teachers? “Eleven convicted sex offenders didn’t lose their Maryland teaching certificates, according to a legislative audit that says state education officials have not put in place adequate safeguards to prevent convicted criminals from working in schools,” the Associated Press reported recently. “The audit of the Maryland Department of Education was done by a watchdog agency that reviews all state departments every three years.”

“The convicted sex offenders who were teachers were not working in a Maryland public school at the time auditors learned they were still certified to teach.”

Rather Biased Ivy

Those who complain, not without reason, that the media and academia are tilted so far left as to make accurate accounts out of either rare may get the best of both worlds in the professional Harvard is trying to lure to Cambridge for an extended visit—

Dan “Memogate” Rather. “He’d be an elder statesman and a truth teller,” says Alex Jones, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. “He could speak about television with a very powerful voice.” Courage.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.