Political Bias in a Public School? Surely Not!

February 10, 2005

Read this Boston Globe story describing how an public high school (Hudson High School) administrator removed a poster advertising the first meeting of the school’s newly formed conservative club? Why? Because the poster, which included links to the website of a national organization for high school conservative clubs, also had “links to videos of beheadings by Iraqi insurgents, saying the links are meant to show what terrorists can do.”

According to the Globe:

The posters immediately drew administrators’ ire. Within a few hours, the posters were removed and access to the Web page was blocked on school computers. An attempt to display the posters last month was also squelched.

“The material was way beyond what I believe the school should be advertising,” said principal John Stapelfeld. “It seemed to be supporting violence more than supporting the conservative message.”

But here’s the rub: Stapelfeld said

that showing terrorist murders did not address the more central problem of growing anti-Americanism abroad.

“Unfortunately, we really haven’t dealt with the fact that we’re not well received in the world anywhere,” he said. “That’s the issue.”

Here’s a classic case of a liberal — assuming the principal is in fact a liberal (but how could he not be with reasoning like this?) — exercising censorship out of a political bias and not even realizing it. In the arrogance of the liberal mindset it is simply an objective fact that we (read: the evil, unilateralist President Bush) has alienated the rest of the civilized world — not to mention the terrorists as well — by our actions in the War on Terror, especially Iraq. The last thing we need to be doing is further agitating the world. And that’s exactly what we’ll do if we encourage the widespread viewing of these beheadings.

I can’t begin to tell you how wrongheaded this is on so many levels. Well, I could, but I might want to write my column on this insanity today, and given all the claims against conservative journalists these days, I don’t want to open myself up to a charge of plagiarizing my own future work. We’ve got to set a high ethical tone here on this blog :)) — that’s a double chin, fyi.

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