Here’s exciting news from the world of Social Justice Warriors:
Three black women attending the University of Albany who say they were the victims of a “racially fueled” on-campus attack in January by fellow white students now stand accused of assault in connection with the incident.
Asha Burwell, 20, of Huntington Station, N.Y.; Ariel Agudio, 20, of Huntington, N.Y.; and Alexis Briggs, 20, of Elmira Heights, N.Y., each face a charge of assault in the third degree, a crime punishable by up to a year in jail. Burwell and Agudio also face other charges including falsely reporting an incident in the third degree.
The women sparked a massive campus anti-racist movement, but it turns out that they probably started the fight themselves. Video evidence indicates that. They may have been willing to lie and stir up racial hatred for selfish ends. If they are guilty, I hope the judge throws the book at them.
Meanwhile, the completely mature students at Pitt took to the fainting couches when confronted by speech they didn’t like:
Yiannopoulos, a controversial conservative writer and activist who tours colleges to speak about the need for free speech, spoke at Pitt Monday evening to a crowd of about 350 students, some of whom protested the lecture. The Board had allocated funding to Pitt College Republicans, who had invited Yiannopoulos to campus.
During his talk, Yiannopoulos called students who believe in a gender wage gap “idiots,” declared the Black Lives Matter movement a “supremacy” group, while feminists are “man-haters.”
The Board said in a release earlier on Tuesday that it understood and empathized with students who were offended by Yiannopoulos’ talk, but that it had a duty to “fairly represent the voice of all students in the allocations funding process.”
In the release, the Board said it must follow the precedent set in the U.S. Supreme Court case Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth, saying a student governing body must “operate under the principle of viewpoint neutrality.”
According to Board member Jack Heidecker, when SGB considers funding for allocations, it must take a neutral stance and cannot consider the content of the speaker. Despite its legal binding, the Board apologized to the students who were hurt from the speech.
“Just because we have to be neutral with our funding doesn’t mean we’re personally neutral — we feel strongly about these things,” Heidecker said. “I hurt yesterday, too.”
“I hurt yesterday too.” One day, Jack Heidecker will be a grown man, and he will be extremely embarrassed by this remark. If he’s lucky.
Moving on, Episcopal priest Anne Fowler has signed an amicus brief testifying that her abortion allowed her to go on to the Episcopal Divinity School, affiliated with Harvard, and then to a thriving career as a minister. From the brief:
In 1981, in her second year at Divinity School, Anne accidentally became pregnant. She believed her partner would not be a suitable parent; their relationship ended soon after the abortion.
Already solely responsible for her daughter, Anne knew she could not complete Divinity School and pursue a career as a priest if she did not have an abortion. She has never regretted her decision and is grateful that she did not have to travel far, which would have caused her additional stress and financial hardship while she cared for her young daughter.
Anne graduated from Divinity School in 1984. She served for 21 years as a priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church, an urban parish in Boston. During her tenure, the parish grew into a vibrant community.
Oh, vibrancy! Turns out that Anne not only killed her unborn child, she also tanked her parish.
Must be something in the air around that Divinity School. Here’s a report on some SJW sisters and their man-free safe space:
Sara Sentilles, MDiv ’01, founded WomenCircle almost 15 years ago. Then known as WomenChurch, Sentilles said she established the group because she needed it.
“I needed a space where language was being used that I could hear myself in—a feminist, queer, anti-racist, politically engaged space. As a feminist in graduate school preparing to be a priest, I struggled in classrooms and in churches. It felt like I was being asked to leave parts of myself (body, politics, sexuality) at the door.”
Ten years later, this need for a supportive community of women continues to be felt.
“Even though it is casually mentioned in class, we don’t always acknowledge how patriarchy has been harmful or how we can begin to repair that damage,” Otero explained. “One of the most common comments I hear during WomenCircle is that our members don’t feel like they have a female space—a women-affirming space—anywhere else.”
More failed congregations to come, no doubt.
Tomorrow, two Bowdoin College student government leaders face impeachment proceedings. Why? They went to a tequila party where some people wore miniature sombreros:
Within days, the Bowdoin Student Government unanimously adopted a “statement of solidarity” to “[stand] by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and recommend that administrators “create a space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.”
The statement deemed the party an act of “cultural appropriation,” one that “creates an environment where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, students feel unsafe.” The effort to purge the two representatives who attended the party, via impeachment, soon followed.
Others involved with the party have already faced school sanctions, including being kicked out of the dorms. Now, I ask you: who in their right mind would choose a college (or send their kids to a college) where things like this happen? Where your college education would be suddenly at risk because you happened to go to a party where people wore funny hats? It’s berserk.
Finally, from my neck of the woods, organizers of a triathlon event at Angola State Penitentiary cancelled the race after SJW threats. According to a press release put out by organizers:
It saddens us deeply that we have to take this action, but in light of recent events, we do not feel like we can offer a safe environment for our athletes coming to compete. The personal attacks and threats being made against us as individuals is also too much to bear. It’s just not worth it.
SJW protesters believed that it was racist, or insensitive, or something, to have a race at a prison — this, even though money raised from it was going to benefit programs for inmates and the prison’s museum.
The war for social justice never ends…