{"id":19685,"date":"2015-03-19T19:02:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-20T02:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19685"},"modified":"2015-03-19T23:53:57","modified_gmt":"2015-03-20T06:53:57","slug":"anti-gay-teacher-censored-by-catholic-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=19685","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Gay Teacher Censored by Catholic High School"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey, we were just discussing censorship! From the Huffington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Patricia Jannuzzi, a religion teacher at Somerville’s Immaculata High School, made headlines last week after she argued that gays “want to reengineer western civ (sic) into a slow extinction” as part of their “agenda” in a post on her now-deleted Facebook profile, MyCentralJersey reported.<\/p>\n

“We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity!!!!!” she wrote alongside a Young Conservatives article about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocate Dan Savage urging Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson to prove that homosexuality is a choice.<\/p>\n

After Jannuzzi’s remarks sparked a media firestorm, school officials reportedly placed her on administrative leave and forced her to deactivate her Facebook page, arguing in a March 13 letter to parents that the comments had been “completely inconsistent with our policy and position as a Catholic Christian community.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, an online petition arguing against Jannuzzi’s statements had drawn over 1,000 signatures at the time this story was first published. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A screencap from her now-deleted Facebook page:<\/p>\n

\"jannuzzi-fb-post\"<\/p>\n

From NJ.com:<\/p>\n

In a statement provided to NJ Advance Media, the school said it took “immediate action” and “mandated that the teacher involved permanently de-active her Facebook page.”<\/p>\n

“The opinions reflected in these posts do not in any way represent the philosophy, mission or student experience of this high school,” the statement said. “… Through our investigation, we have determined that the information posted on this social media page has not been reflected in the curriculum content of the classes she teaches.”<\/p>\n

Januzzi’s Facebook page, which was public at one point, was removed Wednesday morning. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actress Susan Sarandon (whose nephew went to that high school and was a student of Jannuzzi’s) posted about it on her Facebook page, as did some reality show celebrity I’ve never heard of.<\/p>\n

A few thoughts:<\/p>\n

1) Obviously, Jannuzzi’s thoughts are homophobic, ignorant, and suggests that she could do a lot to improve as a person.<\/p>\n

2) Let’s not forget that the Catholic Church’s official position on gays – “objectively disordered” – is also disgusting, homophobic, and wrong. What they are objecting to is not homophobia, but crudely-stated<\/em> homophobia.<\/p>\n

3) But, according to the school, the kind of thinking she posts on her Facebook page isn’t reflected in her teaching. So it’s really shouldn’t be any of the school’s business.<\/p>\n

4) “…the school said it took ‘immediate action’ and ‘mandated that the teacher involved permanently de-active her Facebook page.'” Now that’s<\/em> censorship. “Mandated.” <\/p>\n

5) From the left or the right, this sort of intrusive attack on employee’s freedom by bosses should scare us all to death. Apparently the people who run Immaculata High School don’t understand that just because you give someone a paycheck doesn’t give you a moral right to control what your employees think or write outside of work. <\/p>\n

Because you’re an employee doesn’t (or shouldn’t) make you a serf. And the fact that we depend on our jobs to pay our rent (or mortgage) and eat makes a boss “mandating” what we say inherently coercive. This is disgusting. In a country that really valued free speech, there’d be an enormous wave of revulsion every time a boss acts this way\/<\/p>\n

6) That Change.org petition <\/a>has a little over a thousand signatures as of Thursday evening. A little over a thousand signatures is really not many signatures at all, especially for a story that’s gotten so much coverage. That the school engaged in censorship based on a tiny Change.org petition indicates that the school administrators are either spineless cowards, or they were eager for an excuse.<\/p>\n

7) Incidentally, the Change.org petition originally seemed to be leaning for calling for censorship – the title of the petition, shamefully, is “Stop Public Hate Speech of Teachers” – but more recent edits and updates <\/a>have veered away from calling for either censorship or for firing the teacher, instead asking for sensitivity training. <\/p>\n

8) Susan Sarandon should know better than to criticize an ordinary, non-celeb citizen by name. Talk about punching down! I really like Sarandon generally, but in this case she’s been incredibly thoughtless at best and a bully at worse.<\/p>\n

9) Although I’m not a fan of either the petition-writer’s acts or Sarandon’s, in the end I think it is the School that deserves big heaping piles of scorn for this. They should have the guts to stand up for free speech by criticizing their employee’s statements without suspending her or making her take down the Facebook page; instead, they’ve shown they have no respect at all for free speech or for the basic human rights of their employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey, we were just discussing censorship! From the Huffington Post: Patricia Jannuzzi, a religion teacher at Somerville’s Immaculata High School, made headlines last week after she argued that gays “want to reengineer western civ (sic) into a slow extinction” as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19685"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19691,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19685\/revisions\/19691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}