Dr. James Corbett is an American Hero
December 18th, 2007 by Dane AndradeSO get this: Advocates of Faith and Freedom, an ultra-theocratic advocacy law firm, is representing a student of an Orange Country School District who claims his first amendment rights were violated by Dr. James Corbett, an AP European History Teacher by “convey[ing] a governmental message that students holding religious beliefs are outsiders and not full members of the community. This hostility towards religion is a violation of the establishment clause.”
Dr. Corbett apparently “spends an extended period of time at the beginning of each class discussing topics that are not only irrelevant to history but also inflammatory and often altogether inappropriate for high school students.”
This student, Chad Farnan, brought in a tape recorder and recorded some of the teacher’s rants, including this:
What part of the country has the highest murder rate? The South. What part of the country has the highest rape rate? The South. What part of the country has the highest … church attendance? The South. Oh, wait a minute. You mean there is not a correlation between these things … You know, you go down to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, all these states that are as red as they could possibly be, as right-wing Republican as you could possibly be. When you first present these people with the economic policies of the Democratic party, they are all Democrats. Virtually all the social programs, they like. They lead the Democratic party on social issues. That’s it. Social issues, can you imagine what they’re saying on Rush Limbaugh now? About, ‘Middle school people in New England giving people birth control pills. My God. What next?’ I love Rush Limbaugh. A fat, pain in the a—liar. And, boy, is he a liar. Unbelievable.”
Sheer comic genius. Give this man the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Seriously. I wish I had one teacher like Dr. Corbett in High School.
No. Let me explain this a little better. This lawsuit has been done before, and this language is the language of the previous attempt, the secularists. This is not original. This is merely more proof of the copycat approach to morality and the legal system by the religious dominionists. It isn’t enough that the school system is still a breeding ground for religious indoctrination, and non-believers and other people who would rather teach their kids at home about religion have been ostracized and having failed previous attempts to bring these lawsuits to the courts, this Fascist Law Firm decides to copy the work of organizations like the ACLU. In these previous cases we, the secular taxpayers, have been found to not have standing. Our only victory was erasing mandatory prayer from school and the occasional Lemon Test success, but Christian proselytizing from the podium is not a phantom. If this brings about the demise of teacher’s personal freedoms of ranting about religion from either way… it is a victory for us. Dr. Corbett’s glorious and hilarious rant is what they ask for when theists demand that we allow “mandatory” prayer back in the school system. They ask for the competition of ideas on religion, and they are going to get the opinions of the occasional intelligent man like James Corbett chiming in…
I hope Chad was offended. I hope many people were offended. Not because I’m a cold-hearted anti-theist spewing my hatred into the nethervoids, not at all; it is because it’s an opportunity to learn, to know what it is like to be unlike an authority, and to question authority. My classes were filled with very anti-secular, anti-atheist rhetoric that would make Jonathan Edwards grimace (whose infamous sermon was also taught in my school with reckless literal abandonment). I’ve heard every horror in history, including the Inquisition, unexpectedly blamed on non-believers. My school hosted Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames! No, if anything, this will give our friend Chad that opportunity to faithfully disagree with his professor in a healthy way… it’s an AP course for goodness sake! I am who I am today because I disagreed with my professors, and for every professor who has proven his worth to me, in being unequivocally wrong and out of order, I applaud you.
Alas, I don’t think it is right. My stance is neutrality, although I definately think there is room to discuss the failings of Christianity in a history class. If they win this lawsuit, which they probably will, consider the fallout in our favor. Where we have failed, they will succeed, and close themselves further out of the public tax supported spectrum. For this, Dr. James Corbett, is an American hero.
And for good measure, (I could listen to this guy all day) let’s see what other bits of wisdom our friend has:
The Boy Scouts can’t have it both ways. If they want to be an exclusive, Christian organization or an exclusive, God-fearing organization, then they can’t receive any more support from the state, and shouldn’t.” In the industrialized world the people least likely to go to church are the Swedes. The people in the industrialized world most likely to go to church are the Americans. America has the highest crime rate of all industrialized nations, and Sweden has the lowest. The next time somebody tells you religion is connected with morality, you might want to ask them about that.
Well, we know abstinence doesn’t work. And we know one other thing, and that is, once people become sexually active, they often don’t stop for, like, 40 or 50 years. I mean, generally, when you start you don’t, like, have a conversion and try to become re-virginized, you know. It’s not going to happen.
Sound.
Posted in Legal Gravitas, Fanfare for the Common Man, Information Flow, Enduring Discomforts |
December 18th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
[…] Original post by The Seven Solitudes […]
December 19th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Not a hero, but a criminal. This guy violates the social contract of teacher student relationship as well as basic tenets in the Constitution. His abuse should be stopped and using liberal courts is to do it is ironic.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:17 am
This guy is not a teacher, he is an anti religious activist. Dont talk about religion unless you cover all religions including non-religion. Get a clue this guy is a bully, not a teacher
December 19th, 2007 at 2:50 am
This guy is a public high school teacher who is paid by the state. He sould not be imposing his veiws on people in this manner (especially when it had nothing to do with AP Eurpean History, which I am taking right now actually). It is one thing to talk about the effect of religion duing the time period and what powers they used - it is even responsible to insigate provocatve dicussion about religion (with the students!), but to say outright say that religion is the reason that the world has gone to pot and that all conservatives are violent overzealous evangelicals who by the way are also women-hating war mongers is just plain stupid. Especially when he’s being paid by the government.
This guy is no genius. If he was smarter he would have written a book or posted a blog to communicate to a larger audience and not have gotton him into this mess. It’s one thing to be opinionated, it’s another to insult religion without discussion and force opposition on young impressionable high school students.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:23 am
For what it’s worth, I would have traded any of my sanctimonious teachers in high school that preached from the Christian perspective for this guy. For the record, it was public school too. But apparently my parents didn’t see the necessity of hiring an attorney because my teachers expressed their opinion and I didn’t agree with it. Too bad, huh?
December 19th, 2007 at 11:53 am
I thought I was rather fair…
Answer me this, why is nobody talking about the Middle School Teacher who showed the “Letter From Hell” video in school?
I said I disagreed with it for the same reasons that I disagree with preaching from the classroom. I just also happen to think Dr. Corbett was rather funny.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:59 am
[…] wrote this piece yesterday in a hurry. You can always tell when I do something half-ass because it is usually poorly […]
December 19th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Dane,
I really like reading your writings and I must say that I wish you were on our side! I am twice your age and I cannot write like you. What a glorius gift you would be if you were to use your wit and mind for God’s work. Perhaps you already are by opening our eyes!
I do think you are generaly very antogonistic, but I dont think you were in this entry. i think you were trying to point out the irony of the law guys sueing under the same conditions in previous lawsuits brought by Atheists? God Bless!
December 19th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Yes, my intention was to demonstrate the irony. Thank you for the compliment, now imagine for a second your god didn’t exist… What service would I be performing to the likes of non-existent entities?
December 20th, 2007 at 11:34 am
I think hearing from a different side of things can be good. Certainly worked for me.
December 21st, 2007 at 7:44 am
Thanks Doc, keep up the good atheist work, tell them the truth
December 24th, 2007 at 8:18 am
It is simply amazing how blatantly hypocritical intolorant people such as yourself are. I myself am not a bit religious. However, I respect others belief systems, as I would expect them to do the same. I think Bookworm says it best here in the following script:
I blogged very briefly on Friday about the lawsuit against Dr. James Corbett, who, along with his school district, is being accused of using his AP history classroom to indoctrinate his students in anti-Christian attitudes. I’ve discovered two things since then. First, the LA Times article from which I quoted was disingenuous in the extreme in citing to the inappropriate things Corbett said, since it managed to whitewash the lengthy anti-religious rants in which he engaged. Second, if you read the comments left at that same LA Times article, you’ll see a common threat running through those that defend Dr. Corbett. Almost without exception, his supporters say that it’s appropriate to crudely insult religion and to use history lessons as a rant against Christianity. Why? Because in their minds he’s speaking truth, and it’s an educator’s responsibility to bring truth to his students, especially the benighted Christian ones. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that there is a problem, not with discussing faith, but with insulting faith. I’ve taken many comparative religion classes over my career as a student, which included discussions of the absence of religion, and all were thoughtful and respectful in their approach to and comparison of the different ways of worshiping or denying God.
Not so Dr. Corbett. If you’d like better examples of the crudity of Corbett’s discourse, crudity that is an insult to the Christian religion and that has nothing to do with scholarly discourse about the nature of religion, you only need to check out the allegations in the actual complaint against him.
For example, in the full quote alluded to in the LA Times article, he basically calls religious people ill-informed idiots: “How do you get the peasants to oppose something that is in their best interest? Religion. You have to have something that is irrational to counter that rational approach…. [W]hen you put on your Jesus glasses, you can’t see the truth.”
Another instance of his approach to discussing religion is to take one item of data about two different countries — their religious practices — and from that extrapolate to broad reaching conclusions about their crime rate: “People — in the industrialized world the people least likely to go to church are the Swedes. The people in the industrialized world most likely to go to church are the Americans. America has the highest crime rate of all industrialized nations, and Sweden the lowest. The next time somebody tells you religion is connected with morality, you might want to ask them about that.” It doesn’t seem to occur to him that a huge, melting pot frontier nation such as America might have developed differently from a small, entirely homogeneous nation such as Sweden. A man who thinks this simplistically hardly seems fit to be a teacher, let alone an AP teacher. (Incidentally, Laer, at Cheat-Seeking Missiles, who wrote a wonderful post about the Corbett lawsuit, took the time to show the factual errors underlying this particular rant.)
Corbett also goes on lengthy rants about birth control, something that seems far removed from AP history, and that involves insulting entire American political parties: “….[C]onservatives don’t want women to avoid pregnancies. That’s interfering with God’s work. You got to stay pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen and have babies until your body collapses. All over the world, doesn’t matter where you go, the conservatives want control over women’s reproductive capacity. Everywhere in the world.” That’s news to me. I do know that American conservatives disapprove of out of control sexuality, believing that it is demeaning to the dignity of men and women alike, and that many of them are opposed to abortion, believing that it is destructive of the nascent life of a fetus. The only ones I know who do currently seem to advocate Corbett’s “Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen” attitude are the Taliban but, peculiarly, their views don’t seem included in his rants.
It’s also a bit hard to see where Corbett’s view of Rush Limbaugh (”I love Rush Limbaugh. A fat, pain in the ass liar. And, boy, is he a liar”) fits into the AP History curriculum. Frankly, I also don’t see room in the curriculum for the vulgarities that roll of this man’s tongue. This is a teacher who demeans students, rather than who uplifts and educates them.
The bottom line is that teaching history and critical thinking are not skills that involve lengthy rants that take aim at specific religions and political views, let alone rants that shower students with vulgar language. Those students who have left comments saying that they felt free to disagree with him miss the point. As a public school teacher, Corbett’s job is to provide information, which can include information about doctrine or its effect on historical movements (such as the anti-Slavery movement in American history, for example, which was strongly affected by its adherents’ Christianity). It is not to shout soap box slogans that merely hark back to what were, I’m sure, his youthful days as a Marxist imbued anti-War activist.
December 25th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
You are meant to be the land of the free. Start acting like it. Just because he isn’t a christian like you doesn’t mean he is a devil. Is it right then that christian teachers are allowed to ‘rant’ about their beliefs? whats the difference? There is none, apart from some people would want to silence James Corbett just because his views are in contrast to theirs. So much for democracy.
December 26th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Anonymous Steve,
You didn’t read the whole post. However, thanks for your comment anyway. I actually agree with you in my believe that it was inappropriate. I would like to point out how fast you have resorted to insulting me.
This whole post was about the hypocrisy of Theists in this.. That they would insult non-believers, openly, and publicly, without a second thought, and then, when things are turned around, act the same way.
You also explored so many atheist cliches, that I don’t know where to start? Marxism?
“It is simply amazing how blatantly hypocritical intolorant people such as yourself are.”
Congratulations on your ability to get angry.
Oh, and it’s spelled “intolerant”.
December 27th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
As I high school sociology and politics teacher in the UK, I just came across this story yesterday and have been quite captivated by it.
I thought you weren’t allowed to preach in state schools in the USA?! This guy’s a fundamentalist atheist of the highest order. And obviously a bit of a classroom tyrant too! I couldn’t imagine open, balanced and student-centered debate taking place in his classroom.
Of course the intitutional churches of Europe enormously abused their powers (just as Marxist atheism did later on, not so much “blinding” the people as gouging out their eyes!), but what I heard on the Corbett recording was indoctrination, not education.
Merry Christmas to all believers, and festive greetings to everyone else!
December 28th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
No doubt Matheson. Christians in this country have a righteous, “I can’t possibly be wrong, I’ve got ghosts on my side” mentality. I emphasize again that I disagreed with Dr. Corbett in speaking to the class this way… I think preaching, both ways, should be removed from the classroom…
I do, however, agree with Corbett on a personal level, about the things he actually said.
February 19th, 2008 at 5:39 am
This stupid teacher is not a heroe, but rather f… idiot. Fat liar should be fired immideately stupid m…f…
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Umm. Wth? “I actually agree with you in my believe that it was inappropriate.” Yet you call him a hero. Your definition of a hero certainly differs from mine.
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
James Corbett is spot on. Being Canadian living in a red-neck christian town in the Shenandoah Valley the crime rate here is ten times that of Canada, and the number of churches is astounding. Churches surround our little “hood” slum and do nothing about it. You want to find a meshiah, look inside yourself. Tom Jefferson’s concept of the bible should be studied by all good christians. Go Corbett, Go.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
You know, the people who condemn Dr. Corbett are the same ones who condemned John Lennon for every idea he ever expressed, including his beautiful thoughts in the song “Imagine.” Recite the words to the song, consider what’s happening in the world ~ both good and bad ~ in the name of religion, and THINK. As John would say, it’s easy if you try.
Dr. Corbett raised my eldest son’s level of awareness of what’s happening in our society, and he is now expanding my younger son’s understanding of the world, as well. Has he corrupted them? No. Do they still go to church? Yes, and not by force, by the way. Since attending Dr. Corbett’s class, they read the papers more and have a keener understanding of current events. And their BS-meter goes off a bit more ~ rightfully so!
We are grateful to Dr. Corbett beyond words for treating his students like adults and fostering discussions of world events with them as he would with his peers. May he continue to broaden the outlook of young men and women at our school for a long time to come.
May 25th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Thank you for your comment Dalia, it is good to hear from someone who has a more intimate understanding of the situation. We could use more teachers like Dr. Corbett.