Lazylizzie

Speaking of John Green…

(Jkjk)

It is so close to the mutual abuse myth, where there is a concerted effort to find something “bad” the victim did to blow out of proportion to make equivalent to the plainly abusive actions of the perpetrator.

It is killing me how people are only working themselves up to find faults with the TA because the Christian student is mad. The TA was incredibly kind to the student in their response and that kindness is being used by people who claim to support them to facilitate a national smear campaign

If your claim is that the TA said it was because the student’s views were offensive, you can’t just change tracks when it is shown that the TA did not say anything about the student’s views.

In a comp religion class at a public institution, a Xtian student could write “I think Jews killed Jesus, are evil, and my Bible tells me so” and get the professor fired if they get a bad grade for repeating the oldest slur against several of their classmates?

Did you know that the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary?

You are facilitating her campaign to get to force her religious dogma on us. I hope you can sleep at night.

These are the same people who claim that rules in schools against bullying violate their 1A rights because they should be allowed to call LGBTQ kids slurs.

This is a very kind response from a TA, but because some Christian bigot doesn’t like it, you are all dancing around trying to make the TA the villain here. She did absolutely nothing wrong and anyone discussing this case without making that explicit is doing the bigot’s work for them.

Additionally, to call an entire group of people "demonic" is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population. You are entitled to your own beliefs, but this isn't a vague narrative of "society pushes lies," but instead the result of countless years developing psychological and scientific evidence for these claims and directly interacting with the communities involved. You may personally disagree with this, but that doesn't change the fact that every major psychological, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric association in the United States acknowledges that, biologically and psychologically, sex and gender is neither binary nor fixed.

This is the paragraph I’m referring to. The TA is not calling the viewpoint offensive, just how it was expressed.

The paragraph spanning from image 2-3 in the above makes explicit that the issue is not the viewpoint itself, but how it was expressed.

My religious beliefs are that war is wrong and that abortion is always morally correct. I have been called foolish by professors for the former belief. Were my rights violated? (I do not believe that they were)

No, the TA is extremely clear that it is the way the student expressed that view, not the view itself.

Also, should students claiming young earth get passing grades in a geology course if they assert that theory in a paper?

I suppose clearly written is different than well-written , after all

If nothing else the free speech panic should be an object lesson in the way people work to *produce* nuance to avoid the heart of the matter.

That qualifies as clearly written these days? Ooof.

Honestly, the only error the TA made was to try to extend kindness to the student and provide a detailed explanation for the grade and how she could improve in the future.

He also molested his 6yo adopted daughter…

You’ll notice that the other TA does not use the word “offensive” at all.

Shotspotter is notorious for false positives. What a waste of resources.

Does speech being protected entitle it to a passing grade?

And the student wasn’t barred from sharing that speech, nor was she punished by the state for it. The teacher, however, does seem to be being punished for their speech.

You’ll see that the viewpoint itself is not the basis for the grade, but the way it was expressed:

bsky.app/profile/kiss...

Is the argument really that Christians have the right to insult people using blatantly inappropriate speech and any effort to get them to express their views in an appropriate manner is a violation of their 1A rights?

So why put in so much effort co-signing the bad faith misrepresentations being made against a graduate student who was put in an impossible situation on purpose?

Using offensive language is the reason cited. The TA was emphatic that the grade was not due to the beliefs themselves, but how they were expressed.

It’s actually easy to get around this too. “The Bible says god did x because y (citation of the verse in question).”

Just give it a zero and move on, because treating bad faith actors with kindness almost always backfires.

Nope. Should not have. She did offer the advice to help the student in the future and is now the target of a national smear campaign and lost her job.

The fact that it is difficult to impossible to cite god saying something is a pretty reliable indicator that it’s not appropriate to include it in an academic assignment.

If her argument is based in historical translations (specifically, what the word was in the original Greek, and what that word translates to in modern English), she should cite those translations. If her argument is that god did x because y, she should cite that too