Catholic Marquette – Catholic In Name Only Silences Homosexual Marriage Opponents

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Come on, Mike, get back to bashing Obama.  This is not important.”  This is the only thing that is important.  Because you’re an opponent of homosexual marriage and you may be an opponent because of the teaching of the Church and the teaching of our Lord, and believing that not only are homosexuals committing mortal sin on their souls and are damned to go to hell, so are heterosexual adulterers.  There’s no difference.  This is what I try over and over to impart to people.  The opposition to this is not one that is based in a hatred of a fellow human being.  It is one that is based in a love for their eternal soul, and a wish and a desire imparted to the person —“  Check out today’s transcript and clip of the Day for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I’ve not gotten to the subject and I kept threatening to do it.

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In November, Prof. John McAdams – who blogs at Marquette Warrior – wrote a post critical of a philosophy instructor, Cheryl Abbate. (Abbate is a graduate student but was apparently the sole instructor for the particular section of the Theory of Ethics class, as is not uncommon for undergraduate courses at research universities.) The post faulted Abbate for allegedly not allowing criticism of homosexuality in class discussions:

Abbate explained that “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions” and then went on to ask “do you know if anyone in your class is homosexual?” And further “don’t you think it would be offensive to them” if some student raised his hand and challenged gay marriage?” The point being, apparently that any gay classmates should not be subjected to hearing any disagreement with their presumed policy views.

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Mike:  Rod Dreher has a post on it at AmConMag.com.  You can also find it at the Washington Compost under The Volokh Conspiracy.  Here’s what happened afterwards, according to Volokh.

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The post also claimed that the administration wasn’t taking the student’s complaints seriously. The story got some media attention, and harsh public criticism for Abbate.

Now, McAdams has gotten this letter from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences:

Dear John:

The university is continuing to review your conduct and during this period – and until further notice – you are relieved of all teaching duties and all other faculty activities, including, but not limited to, advising, committee work, faculty meetings and any activity that would involve your interaction with Marquette students, faculty and staff. Should any academic appeals arise from Fall 2014 semester, however, you are expected to fulfill your obligations in that specific matter.

Your salary and benefits will continue at their current level during this time.

You are to remain off campus during this time, and should you need to come to campus, you are to contact me in writing beforehand to explain the purpose of your visit, to obtain my consent and to make appropriate arrangements for that visit. I am enclosing with this letter Marquette’s harassment policy, its guiding values statement, the University mission statement, and sections from the Faculty Handbook, which outline faculty rights and responsibilities; these documents will inform our review of your conduct.

Sincerely,

Dean

The letter doesn’t specifically indicate what McAdams is being investigated for; and no passages in the documents that the dean attached were highlighted in a way that suggests specific details on this. But McAdams believes this suspension and removal from campus must have been caused by the earlier post: “Since we have done nothing particularly controversial lately besides blog about the Philosophy instructor (one Cheryl Abbate), we have to assume that’s what it is about.” And Marquette seems to support this; I wrote them last night saying, “Prof. McAdams’ Dec. 16 post suggests that the paid suspension and the exclusion from campus was triggered entirely by his Nov. 9 post. But of course if there’s more to the story, I’d love to know.” Marquette responded by saying:

“Given that professor John McAdams has shared his personnel information on his public blog, we are sharing the following information:

“Last month, Marquette University began reviewing both a concern raised by a student and a concern raised by a graduate student teaching assistant. While this review continues, professor John McAdams has been relieved of his teaching duties and other faculty duties. His salary and benefits will continue during the course of the review.”

Given that the university’s actions seem to be based just on McAdams’s criticism of another instructor those actions strike me as quite improper. Marquette is a private university, and thus not bound by the First Amendment; and Wisconsin is not one of the states that generally restricts private employer retaliation based on an employee’s speech. Still, Marquette frames itself as a university that respects academic freedom and free speech rights. Acting this way towards a faculty member who publicly expresses his opinions on an important issue, including when the issue involves what he sees as an improper suppression of student views by a colleague, stifles that freedom.

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Mike:  What you don’t know is that Ms. Abbate told a student, when he raised his hand and said: What if I stand on my opinion and I remain opposed to homosexual marriage and wish to voice this opinion in this class?  Ms. Abbate told the student: You should drop the class.  In other words, in a class on ethics and philosophy, we’re not going to allow certain philosophies and certain ethics in the room.  The young man is actually being ethical.  He’s attending a Catholic university.  The Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality, its teachings on all the sexual perversions, and its teachings on marriage are not in question.  Pope Francis hasn’t changed all that, any of it.  The Synod hasn’t changed any of it.  So who’s being ethical here?

I didn’t do this story yesterday.  Let me tie the two together.  In 2009, President Obama was invited to give the commencement ceremony and received an honorary degree from Notre Dame.  Obama, the most celebrated and accomplished abortion promoter in the history of the presidency, and Notre Dame invites him to commencement.  There were but a few instructors at Notre Dame that dared raise their voice at the time, and they only did so outside their capacity as instructors because they knew they had been told that if they did so, they would face the wrath of the faculty.

So Obama is invited to Catholic Notre Dame to preach sacrilege, to preach anathema as an ambassador of a sacrilege, as an ambassador of a mortal sin, as an ambassador of an anathema.  He can go.  I am certain that there are very Catholic students, or there were, at the time of Obama’s appearance.  Of course, their four years’ and their parents’ four years’ worth of tuition thinking they were getting a good, solid, Catholic education matters not.  Having the president as our commencement speaker, that’s a big hoop-de-doo deal.  You might as well have just invited Beelzebub himself.  You might as well just identify one of those demon’s names from an exorcist movie and just invited one of them to give the address.  I’ve got a better idea.  Why not just have a Satanic mass and invite the guy that does that mass to Notre Dame?  These are some of the things that were said at the time.

Two days ago, Governor Bobby Jindal, my governor, has been savagely attacked in the Louisiana press and media around Louisiana State University because Jindal is going to conduct, on the 19^th of January, a prayer service.  Simple as that.  He’s attending it.  A private entity is funding it and has rented the space and providing all the security.  Everything is being done privately, but it’s going to be done on the LSU campus.  What has been the fallout from this?  You wouldn’t believe it.  Here again, Louisiana State University was begun as a what?  It was begun as a seminary in 1858, a seminary to train young men in seminary life and as members of the Louisiana militia.

“LSU students organize protest of Bobby Jindal prayer rally,” so apparently the only thing you’re not allowed to do in our institutions of higher learning, the only point of view that you’re not allowed to bring to a university today, the only point of view that you’re discouraged from having is the old-school, traditional one that started the university in the first place.  So they’re free and open and all multicultural and diverse unless you’re Christian, unless you’re a Catholic.  [mocking] “Well, we didn’t mean diverse like that.”

[reading]

LSU student organizations as well as other groups from around the state plan to protest Gov. Bobby Jindal’s mass prayer event, called The Response, at the university’s Baton Rouge campus.

Jindal will host the mid-day rally Jan. 24 at the Peter Maravich Assembly Center. A Mississippi-based conservative Christian group, called the American Family Association, is covering the event’s costs.

The protest, called Organizing Against Hate Groups . . .

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Mike:  Folks, you may be saying, [mocking] “Come on, Mike, get back to bashing Obama.  This is not important.”  This is the only thing that is important.  Because you’re an opponent of homosexual marriage and you may be an opponent because of the teaching of the Church and the teaching of our Lord, and believing that not only are homosexuals committing mortal sin on their souls and are damned to go to hell, so are heterosexual adulterers.  There’s no difference.  This is what I try over and over to impart to people.  The opposition to this is not one that is based in a hatred of a fellow human being.  It is one that is based in a love for their eternal soul, and a wish and a desire imparted to the person — I can’t say it’s this case in all instances; in my case I can vouch for it — that they not be eternally damned.  The Holy Gospels on this, the Church’s teaching on this is crystal clear.  It’s not at issue.  If we’re to believe in Heaven and Hell, then we know the result of committing these mortal sins.  You go to Hell.  It’s pretty simple stuff here.

To sit here in denial of that and to say you hate someone because you wish for them not to go to hell, which would have been an accepted thing to say for almost 1,990 years — think about that.  This would only have been unacceptable in the last 30 years.  It’s not because Christ has returned and told us that we can think like that.  It’s unacceptable because the civil religion of man and all of those demonic things that were working at Sodom and Gomorrah, all those things that were working that Josephus wrote about at the fall of Jerusalem when the Temple fell in 80 AD, all those things are at work here.  They’re at work right here, yet we won’t talk about them.  Instead, we want to obsess over: I think the states ought to control marriage.  That’s great.  I hope it was a glass of cold milk you got with that statement.  That doesn’t go anywhere towards solving the societal, civilizational, and moral problem that’s at stake here.  It is a problem.  It is an issue.

I don’t know who this professor is, but we’re talking about Marquette here.  We’re not talking about John Doe University.  They were founded by Jesuits, for Heaven’s sake!  Not anymore, though.  It’s easy to complain and moan about [mocking] “I wish it was the way it used to be.  I wish we didn’t have to live in this time.”  The way I try to look at this, and the way I’m trying to learn myself, and the way I hope others look at that is, we live in a great time.  We live in an opportunity of apostolates.  We have great opportunities here to perform apostolates on behalf of the true faith.

End Mike Church Show Transcript