04 Culture

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Two students, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, have won $500K each from St. Francis High School, California. The two students were expelled after being accused of doing “blackface” when a social media post of the two men wearing acne crème went viral.

Krista Boughman, one of the students’ lawyers, said of the victory, “This case is significant not only for our clients but for its groundbreaking effect on all private high schools in California, which are now legally required to provide fair procedure to students before punishing or expelling them. The jury rightly confirmed that St. Francis High School’s procedures were unfair to our clients and that the school is not above the law.”

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Excerpt from slaynews.com

Two wrongly expelled high school students have won $1 million in compensation after they were falsely accused of wearing “blackface” and publicly smeared as “racist.”

The students filed a lawsuit after they were expelled from St. Francis High School in California.

The legal team leading the case has just announced that the court handed them a $1 million verdict in the fight over the wrongful expulsion.

The students, Holden Hughes and Aaron Hartley, will get $500,000 each from St. Francis High School.

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Excerpt from pjmedia.com

… it’s apparently illegal to say the term “illegal alien” in a classroom as Leah McGhee’s high school son Christian found out.

The North Carolina kid was given an assignment by his English teacher to write about the word “alien.” Christian McGhee asked the teacher for clarification. Was it a “space alien” or an “illegal alien without green cards”?

One of the kids in Christian’s class took offense to using the term “illegal aliens,” and the school administration agreed. Christian was suspended for three days.

For sheer idiocy, this tops the list. The kid was asking a question about an assignment. He wasn’t disparaging anyone or singling out any ethnic group.

The Liberty Justice Center took the case.

“Even though Christian asked a factual, non-threatening question—about a word the class was discussing—the school board branded him with false accusations of racism,” Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center Buck Dougherty said in a statement. “The school has not only violated his constitutional right to free speech but also his right to due process and his right to access education, a guaranteed right under North Carolina law. We are proud to stand beside Christian and his family in challenging this egregious violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

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Excerpt from www.motherjones.com

The city of New York is discriminating against its gay male employees by denying them the same health care benefits as women and straight men, a new lawsuit alleges. Under the city’s insurance, employees are entitled to coverage for up to three rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in their quest to have children—that is, unless they are gay men.

In a class action lawsuit filed Thursday, which appears to be the first federal case specifically about gay men’s access to IVF, a former city employee and his spouse claim that by denying them benefits available to all other employees, the city is engaging in discrimination based on sex and sexual orientation. Nothing else, they argue, explains why they were treated differently.

“There is no legitimate, non-discriminatory explanation for why the City’s healthcare plan would offer IVF benefits when the male plan participant’s partner is female but withhold IVF benefits when the male plan participant’s partner is male,” the complaint, filed in federal court in New York, states.

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Excerpt from www.lifenews.com

A small Catholic college in northwest Indiana will honor the pro-LGBT U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Ambassador Joe Donnelly will reportedly keynote Calumet College of St. Joseph’s graduation ceremony this weekend. Donnelly previously served as U.S. Senator from Indiana.

The school does not list Donnelly as a speaker on its website, but the Post-Tribune, a local newspaper, lists him as the speaker. The College Fix left a voicemail with a university official on Tuesday seeking confirmation Donnelly is still the planned speaker.

While senator, he sometimes voted pro-life, including for a 20-week federal limit on abortion. The Democrat regularly voted to protect taxpayer funding of abortion giant Planned Parenthood and supported the LGBT agenda, despite being Catholic.

“I support marriage equality because we are a stronger state and a stronger country when we support inclusion, respect, and equality for all Americans,” Donnelly said in 2018 while running for re-election.

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Excerpt from www.lifenews.com

In response to the discovery of explicit pro-abortion graffiti on the doors of a Catholic church in Portland, Oregon on Sunday morning, the church’s pastor prayed for the vandal at Mass and expressed hope during the homily that the vandal would one day become an usher.

Just before Sunday Mass on April 28, explicit pro-abortion graffiti was found sprayed on the sidewalk by St. Patrick’s Church and on the church’s wooden front doors.

Fr. Timothy Furlow, who has been the pastor at St. Patrick’s Church since 2018, asked those at Mass that day to pray for the vandal instead of wrathfully seek justice or harbor hatred.

“You probably saw the graffiti on the way in,” Fr. Furlow began in his homily. “Somebody said, ‘Oh we gotta cover this up.’ I’m like, ‘Nope, I want them to see that.’ And the reason is because it fits kind of perfectly with what the core message of the Gospel is.”

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Excerpt from www.lifenews.com

Students for Life Action (SFLAction) will be on the ground in Arizona on Wednesday, beginning an effort to educate voters in the districts of multiple Republican lawmakers who voted to pass HB2677, which removed the recently upheld pro-life laws protecting life early in pregnancy.

SFLAction President Kristan Hawkins said, “When mothers and babies were betrayed by a few Republican leaders, we promised that there would be consequences – today in Arizona, we’re beginning that grassroots ground campaign to hold five Republicans accountable who joined forces with the pro-abortion Democrats and turned their backs on the preborn.”  

Beginning in four districts * (seen below) in the Phoenix area, SFLAction volunteers and staff will walk through the districts of the three House Republicans and two State Senate Republicans who threw their votes behind pro-abortion Democrats, ensuring passage of HB2677.  

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Excerpt from lidblog.com

Democrats are populated by subgroups with overlapping views: liberals, progressives, socialists, and Marxists. In their eyes, virtually any topic that you can address – the total eclipse in April, for example – has some underlying racial component embedded within it. Not all topics have a racial component, but that is what they propagate on a daily basis.

Leftists want to keep race at the forefront of all public discourse and are on the ever-present lookout for anything which they regard as a transgression when others are referring to minorities. They particularly are focused on anything that a Conservative says, at any time, even if it was 30 or 40 years ago, that to the Left some way represents a slight or lack of respect for minorities, particularly Black Americans.

For these ‘race police’ it’s like a game. They are delighted when they are able to find something, anything, that they can aggrandize to the hilt, have the mainstream media pick up, and whip into a social and cultural frenzy.

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Excerpt from www.science20.com

After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen.Even though it was hypocritical – epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited – few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even their lawyers look like better people than other lawyers. They are, they assure us, poorly paid evangelists for health and safety against Evil Corporations.

Except none of that is true. For that ethical halo to be punctured even slightly, someone like Tom Girardi, who turned the “Erin Brockovich” case, trace levels of hexavalent chromium in Hinckley, California, into hundreds of millions of dollars for himself, has to engage in such spectacular fraud it gets attention. And even then his environmental shakedowns are minimized, though they were the same tactics he used against Pacific Gas  &  Electric.

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Excerpt from www.lifesitenews.com

(LifeSiteNews) — William Goodman, a member of the “DC Nine” peaceful pro-life rescuers who are facing an unprecedented 11 years in prison, told LifeSiteNews that no matter what happens as a result of his sentencing next week, it “will be an opportunity to try and love, serve, and obey God.”

With six of his confreres who were found guilty of violating the FACE Act and participating in a “conspiracy against rights” for performing a traditional rescue at an abortion facility in 2020, Goodman has been held in federal custody at the Alexandria Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia, since late last summer awaiting sentencing by pro-abortion Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.

The sentencing hearings begin next Tuesday, May 14, and conclude on the following Friday.

Fellow rescuer John Hinshaw describes their crime as “attempting to stop the slaughter of late-term babies in the Santangelo abortion mill in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, the importance of these sentences cannot be overstated, since never before has “peaceful civil disobedience faced such legal violence as our federal law enforcement is now practicing!”

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Excerpt from www.lifesitenews.com

DUBLIN (LifeSiteNews) — An Irish witch and self-professed “non-binary” individual is representing the once-Catholic nation in the 2024 Eurovision song contest, performing a song with blatant representations of satanism and occult behavior.

On May 7, 31-year-old Bambie Ray Robinson – known by her stage name of “Bambie Thug” – secured a place in the Eurovision final taking place on May 11 in Sweden. Robinson claims to be non-binary and describes her work as “Ouija pop,” with prominent and indeed central aspects of satanic-inspired images, actions and symbols present throughout.

Explaining her stage name, Robinson said that “Bambie Thug is your witchy king antidote to the world” during an interview on YouTube.

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Excerpt from www.christianitytoday.com

Eye-catching election placards are popping up across the Europe Union. They appear overnight in public squares and in front of train stations, along the Autobahn and the Champs-Élysées and many lesser-known rues, strassen, and calles.

With bright colors and bold slogans, each promises to make a difference in the European Parliament, if only passersby will vote for their party in the upcoming election.

“Make Europe strong,” says one.

“Make it happen,” urges another.

And there’s a new slogan for a new party in Spain: “United in values, guided by faith.”

The sign asks people to vote for Fe, Infancia, Educación, y Libertad (Faith, Childhood, Education, and Liberty) or FIEL, a new, explicitly evangelical Christian party. The party’s candidate for the European parliament may not actually appear on ballots in June, though. Before Juan José Cortés can stand for election, FIEL needs 15,000 signatures by May 12.

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Excerpt from lidblog.com

By Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., We’ve all witnessed the recent drama of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Jewish protests on college campuses. A recent discovery at one of the protests speaks volumes about the whole movement. In the tents of the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protesters at NYU, the police who cleared out their den of dissent uncovered signs which said, […]

The post The ‘Death to America’ Crowd appeared first on The Lid.

The far-left site Jacobin is discovering the fact that Canada’s physician-assisted suicide law isn’t allowing terminally ill people to die with dignity so much as it is enabling the state to pressure tax liabilities to commit suicide to avoid being a burden on society.

The author of the piece, David Moscrop, decried “Canada boasts one of the world’s highest assisted-death rates, supposedly enabling the terminally ill to die with dignity. However, this suicide program increasingly resembles a dystopian replacement for care services, exchanging social welfare for euthanasia…

For want of a mattress, a man is dead. That’s the story, in sum, of a quadriplegic man who chose to end his life in January through medically assisted death. Normand Meunier’s story, as reported by the CBC, began with a visit to a Quebec hospital due to a respiratory virus. Meunier subsequently developed a painful bedsore after being left without access to a mattress to accommodate his needs. Thereafter, he applied to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program.”

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Excerpt from www.lifenews.com

David Moscrop wrote an excellent article that was published by Jacobin Magazine on May 2, 2024. Jacobin is an ideologically left magazine, which is concerned about Canada killing people with disabilities and the poor by euthanasia, known as MAiD. The article begins with this quote:

Canada boasts one of the world’s highest assisted-death rates, supposedly enabling the terminally ill to die with dignity. However, this suicide program increasingly resembles a dystopian replacement for care services, exchanging social welfare for euthanasia.

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The Boy Scouts of America are officially no more as the vestige that was the Boy Scouts of America let the world know of its official death by announcing the organization is now known as Scouting America. The President of the non-binary organization optimistically stated, “In the next 100 years we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs.”

Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com

IRVING: The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name for the first time in its 114-year history and will become Scouting America. It’s a significant shift as the organization emerges from bankruptcy following a flood of sexual abuse claims and seeks to focus on inclusion.
The organization steeped in tradition has made seismic changes after decades of turmoil, from finally allowing gay youth to welcoming girls throughout its ranks.With an eye on increasing flagging membership numbers, the Irving, Texas-based organization announced the name change Tuesday at its annual meeting in Florida.

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Excerpt from www.dailysignal.com

A West Virginia judge granted a preliminary injunction allowing several middle school girls to compete after the school district banned them from competition after refusing to play against a biological male, according to 12 WBOY, a local media outlet.

Five middle school female athletes forfeited their positions at a track meet in April after they were informed that they would have to compete against a biological male, prompting the school district to allegedly bar the girls from future competitions, according to WDTV News. The students sued and Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia filed an amicus brief in support of the students.

A Harrison County judge ordered that the school’s decision be temporarily halted while the lawsuit plays out, according to 12 WBOY.

“I want to say to these students and their parents: I have your backs,” Morrisey said in a press release. “You saw unfairness and you expressed your disappointment and sacrificed your personal performances in a sport that you love; exercised your constitutionally protected freedom of speech and expression.”

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Excerpt from www.louderwithcrowder.com

 

Progressives tend to not like this little thing called “state law.” That is why we often see them admittedly oppose legislation to the point that an entire city or state has dubbed itself a “sanctuary” to defy that law. Subsequently, we now have another city declaring itself a trans sanctuary for minors, with emphasis on the part that is dedicated to children.

The Austin City Council passed a resolution that would de facto stop the enforcement of SB 14, which essentially bans gender-affirming care for minors.

According to the National Review:

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is threatening to hold the city of Austin’s leaders accountable for openly defying the state’s law prohibiting health-care providers from performing irreversible transgender medical procedures on children.

The Austin City Council voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to pass a resolution offering protections for minors who identify as transgender and instructing police not to prioritize enforcement of SB 14, a law signed by Republican governor Greg Abbott last year banning hormonal and surgical interventions meant to facilitate a minor’s gender transition.

“If the City of Austin refuses to follow the law and protect children, my office will consider every possible response to ensure compliance,” Paxton, a Republican, said upon the resolution’s passage. “Texas municipalities do not have the authority to pick and choose which state laws they will or will not abide by. The people of Texas have spoken, and Austin City Council must listen.”

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Excerpt from cbs12.com

Rose City Counter-Info, a self-described “anarchist” group based in Portland, Oregon, took credit Monday for having “torched” 15 police cars at the Portland Police Bureau’s (PPB) training facility.

The group says last week’s attack was a “preemptive” one, pointing to recent police intervention at anti-Israel college campus protests nationwide. It noted on its blog members “cut through a fence, set ten fires and are happy it grew to burn fifteen cars!”

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Excerpt from www.independent.co.uk

The new Online Harms Bill, unveiled in February by Canada’s ruling Liberal Party and championed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, would create a government body charged with regulating hate speech and protecting children on social media.

Separately, it would also raise the maximum sentences for illegal hate speech, while allowing citizens to report discriminatory speech to a human rights tribunal with the power to award compensation of up to C$20,000 or a fine of up to C$50,000.

On Tuesday, Mr Musk retweeted what appears to be an untrue claim about the bill: that it gives police the power to arrest anyone who has ever posted hate speech, even if it happened before the bill was passed.

“This sounds insane if accurate! @CommunityNotes, please check,” said Mr Musk on X (formerly Twitter), tagging in the social network’s crowdsourced fact checking service to examine the claim.

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Excerpt from nebraskaexaminer.com

The top lawyers for Arkansas and Missouri on Tuesday announced the filing of a lawsuit with four other states, including Nebraska, against the U.S. Department of Education’s change to Title IX that, among other things, codifies protections for LGBTQ+ students.

The federal rule, announced in April, protects students and school employees from sex-based discrimination, requires schools to offer support for people who make complaints, sets guidelines for schools and includes transgender students in the law’s protections. It is expected to go into effect Aug. 1.

The 60-page lawsuit alleges the education department has exceeded its authority by rewriting the statute. It also claims the rule violates the First Amendment, is arbitrary and capricious by going against “decades” of understanding of Title IX and presents “an actual controversy” by redefining “sex” to include gender identity.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, seeks to ultimately stop the federal rule’s effective date.

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Excerpt from www.thecollegefix.com

Modern equivalent of ‘scrawling cruel rumors on the bathroom wall,’ president says

The University of North Carolina System plans to ban anonymous social media apps across its 16 campuses, arguing the technology companies have a “reckless disregard” for students’ wellbeing.

Other universities are considering similar bans, prompting concerns from free speech advocates.

UNC System President Peter Hans announced the plan in a two page statement to the UNC Board of Governors earlier this semester. Hans said social media apps are the modern equivalent of “scrawling cruel rumors on the bathroom wall,” and the most destructive ones will be blocked by the UNC System infrastructure.

His statement did not include a timeline for the social media block. The College Fix reached out to UNC three times via email and phone call for comment in the past two weeks, but the university did not respond.

“We’re targeting a handful of smaller, hyper-local platforms that have shown reckless disregard for the wellbeing of young people and an outright indifference to bullying and bad behavior,” Hans said in his statement.

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Excerpt from uk.news.yahoo.com

Georgia’s ruling party bussed in thousands of people from across the country on Monday for a rally in the capital aimed at countering days of mass anti-government protests over a controversial “foreign influence” bill.

The Black Sea Caucasus nation has been gripped by mass anti-government protests since mid-April, when the ruling Georgian Dream party reintroduced plans to pass a law that critics say resembles Russian legislation used to silence dissent.

The European Union has said that, if adopted, the proposed legislation would undermine Tbilisi‘s long-standing bid for EU membership.

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Excerpt from alabamareflector.com

A federal judge Monday allowed a lawsuit aimed at stopping Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall from prosecuting those who help Alabamians seek out-of-state abortion care to move forward.

U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson denied Marshall’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, upholding the plaintiff’s claims of right to travel and limits on the extraterritorial application of state law.

“The claim will not be dismissed because (a) the right to travel includes the right both to move physically between states and to do what is lawful in those states, and (b) prosecuting those who facilitate lawful out-of-state abortions, as the attorney general threatens to do, would violate that right,” Thompson wrote in the ruling.

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Excerpt from www.westernjournal.com

As our country barrels heedlessly towards the uttermost bounds of depravity, even the country’s hallowed national monuments are no longer safe from those promoting this degeneracy.

From Joe Biden inviting transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to speak with him at the White House to inviting other transgender influencers who took off their shirts on the White House lawn, the Biden administration has ensured that nation’s capital would become a hotbed of this increasing degeneracy.

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Excerpt from www.wicz.com

The suits were brought not by women seeking an out-of-state abortion but rather by groups that intend to help them. Thompson, appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter, wrote that a patient’s right to travel was “inextricably bound up” with those groups. Collectively, he wrote, the groups receive as many as 95 inquiries each week asking about the availability of out-of-state abortions.

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Excerpt from www.wsiltv.com

(CNN) — A Texas man is seeking a court order so he can depose a woman he was dating who traveled to Colorado to get an abortion, in a case that may have ramifications in the ongoing legal battles over abortion rights.

Collin Davis, a resident of Brazos County, filed a legal petition in March stating that on February 20 — the day after he learned the woman intended to obtain the abortion — he retained an attorney, who sent the woman a letter requesting that she preserve all records related to her plans to terminate the pregnancy.

According to the petition, the letter warned that he “would pursue wrongful-death claims against anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child.”

Davis argues that the deposition is necessary to determine whether there was a violation of the Texas wrongful-death statute, which the petition references alongside a Texas civil code that includes among those defined as individuals “an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” His petition additionally points to Texas’ civil enforcement six-week abortion ban, known as SB 8.

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Excerpt from www.lifenews.com

A leading pro-life group tells LifeNews.com today that it refuses to follow a new Biden rule forcing employers to promote abortions.

In December 2022, Congress passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), a pro-life bill that aimed to make the workplace more accessible to pregnant women by requiring employers to provide accommodations to pregnant workers under The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This bill was implemented at the end of June 2023.

However, the Biden administration is manipulating the bill’s language to require that employers provide accommodations for abortion.

The PWFA requires employers to provide “reasonable accommodations to a worker’s known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless the accommodation will cause the employer an undue hardship.” However, the bill does not define what is considered a “reasonable accommodation,” or what is considered a “related medical condition.”

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Excerpt from www.thecollegefix.com

Leaders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have told faculty to discontinue the practice of requiring mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion statements in faculty hiring.

“On Saturday, an MIT spokesperson confirmed in an email to me that ‘requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT,’ adding that the decision was made by embattled MIT President Sally Kornbluth ‘with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans,’” John Sailer reported for Unherd.

“…In a statement provided to me via email, president Kornbluth notes: ‘We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.’”

He described it as a “watershed moment” because MIT is “the first elite private university to backtrack on the practice that has been roundly criticised as a political litmus test.”

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Excerpt from nationalcenter.org

Washington, D.C. – Shareholder activists with the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) will present proposals at six shareholder meetings this week — American Express, Intel, General Electric, Progressive, Ford and Duke Energy.

On Tuesday, May 7, FEP will confront American Express, Intel and General Electric (GE) at each company’s virtual shareholder meeting.

At the American Express meeting, FEP will stand up for the rights and privacy of legal gun owners by presenting Proposal 7, which demands transparency about the company’s potential flagging of customer purchases at gun and ammunition stores.

In its supporting statement, FEP questions “whether the best choice is not to track these lawful and constitutionally protected purchases in any way, as well as the dangers associated with sharing any information gathered with government representatives whose use of the information can only be to surveil and harass those who exercise their lawful right to keep and bear Arms.”