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  1. #1
    Senior Member HAPPY2BME's Avatar
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    South Carolina - USC Upstate facing more cuts over gay-themed programming

    The State
    By CASSIE COPE
    April 4, 2014

    Much of the outcry was over the planned performance by Leigh Hendrix of “How to be a lesbian in 10 days or less,” a comical story about coming out as gay.
    USC Upstate facing more cuts over gay-themed programming

    COLUMBIA, SC — The University of South Carolina Upstate could have its budget cut again for another gay-themed program on the Spartanburg campus.

    The school is hosting a symposium on gay topics that at one point included a lecture titled, “How to be a lesbian in 10 days or less.” The event comes a month after the House of Representatives cut $17,142 from USC Upstate’s budget for assigning freshmen to read an essay book on coming out gay in the South.

    At least three state senators said Friday they are upset about USC Upstate’s gay-themed programming. They vow to not only keep the House’s cut but also slash more from the school’s budget next year.

    “If they’ve got extra money sitting around to promote perversion, obviously they’ve got more money than they really need,” said S.C. Sen. Kevin Bryant, an Anderson Republican who sits on the Senate budget-writing committee.

    The symposium was planned a year ago – long before lawmakers took aim at the 5,400-student school, said Clif Flynn, associate vice chancellor academic affairs for the university.

    The conference cost about $11,500, said Reid Toth, the school’s department chairwoman of sociology, criminal justice, and women’s studies. About $5,000 was paid by the school and $6,500 was covered by private grants, she said.

    The House funding cut, approved last month, was based on the cost of the reading program that assigned “Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio” in the fall. The House also trimmed $52,000 from the College of Charleston for assigning freshmen another gay-themed book “Fun Home.”

    Senators are weighing the state’s $24 billion budget now.

    “I think it’s time that these institutions be held accountable,” Sen. Lee Bright, R-Spartanburg, said.

    Bright, who is running for the U.S. senate, said many people in Spartanburg are upset about the activities on the USC Upstate campus.

    “Higher education is becoming more about indoctrination and less about education,” he said.

    Bryant and Bright were among 21 Senate and House members who voted against USC board members running unopposed during trustees elections this week because the Columbia flagship campus oversees Upstate.

    Sen. State Mike Fair, who also sits on the Senate’s finance committee, said he voted against the trustees “to protest questionable campus activities at USC Upstate and the main campus.”

    The Greenville Republican said he felt uncomfortable raising the issue because he loves the university, his alma mater where he was a starting quarterback and a trustee.

    “It’s an absolute insult to the moms and dads who are paying for their children’s education at USC Upstate,” Fair said.

    USC Upstate’s Bodies of Knowledge Symposium, slated for next Thursday and Friday, focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual orientation issues and has stirred a typically conservative section of the state.

    The college – which hosts a national conference on child abuse and an undergraduate research symposium highlighting students’ work – did not intend to stir controversy with the symposium, school officials said.

    The theme is “an optional opportunity (for students) to explore some of these topics which they probably would not get to in a class or in another type of organized workshop,” Toth said.

    Much of the outcry was over the planned performance by Leigh Hendrix of “How to be a lesbian in 10 days or less,” a comical story about coming out as gay.

    But some people took it as an instructive performance, instead of a comedy, USC Upstate spokeswoman Tammy Whaley said.

    The event was cut after community and political uproar.

    Sen. John Courson, chairman of the higher education senate finance subcommittee, said his panel has not discussed cutting funds to schools because of gay-themed programs. The Richland Republican said he had a problem with censorship on campuses.

    “I don’t think we should as a legislature micromanage exactly what is being taught and discussed in college,” he said.

    If legislators start picking on one group, they could move onto others, said Ryan Wilson, director of S.C. Equality, which advocates for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender South Carolinians.

    “These legislators say they are concerned about taxpayer dollars,” Wilson said. “What about my taxpayer dollars?”



    http://www.thestate.com/2014/04/04/3...cuts-over.html
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  2. #2
    Senior Member HAPPY2BME's Avatar
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    Whose Side Is God on Now?
    Friday - April 4, 2014 at 2:33 am

    By Patrick J. Buchanan

    In his Kremlin defense of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin, even before he began listing the battles where Russian blood had been shed on Crimean soil, spoke of an older deeper bond.

    Crimea, said Putin, “is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.”

    Russia is a Christian country, Putin was saying.

    This speech recalls last December’s address where the former KGB chief spoke of Russia as standing against a decadent West:

    “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.”

    Heard any Western leader, say, Barack Obama, talk like that lately?

    Indicting the “Bolsheviks” who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, “May God judge them.”

    What is going on here?

    With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

    In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side. The West is Gomorrah.

    Western leaders who compare Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria, who dismiss him as a “KGB thug,” who call him “the alleged thief, liar and murderer who rules Russia,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins did, believe Putin’s claim to stand on higher moral ground is beyond blasphemous.

    But Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on “The Third Rome.”

    The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was — Moscow.

    Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

    Putin is plugging into some of the modern world’s most powerful currents.

    Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America’s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.

    He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.

    In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a “culture of death.”

    What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?

    The West’s capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide — the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

    Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, “They were LGBT.”

    “It was an eye-opening moment,” wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest.

    Author Masha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, “Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.”

    But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia’s role, in Putin’s words, is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

    Would that be the “chaotic darkness” and “primitive state” of mankind, before the Light came into the world?

    This writer was startled to read in the Jan-Feb. newsletter from the social conservative World Council of Families in Rockford, Ill., that, of the “ten best trends” in the world in 2013, number one was “Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader.”

    In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on homosexual propaganda, a ban on abortion advertising, a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on sacrilegious insults to religious believers.

    “While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view,” writes WCF’s Allan Carlson, “Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values. During the Soviet era, Western communists flocked to Moscow. This year, World Congress of Families VII will be held in Moscow, Sept. 10-12.”

    Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote?

    In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now?

    http://buchanan.org/blog/whose-side-god-now-6337
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