The ordinance allows a fine and even possible jail time for those in violation.

Apparently the school was just continuing business as usual with its "discriminatory" policy, in pretty evident violation of the city ordinance. I don't know if their legal eagles hadn't told them what was up, if they intended to be engaging in civil disobedience (and in this case, good for them if they were), or if they were just hoping the issue wouldn't come up. But there you have it. They fired her, and a city official or two could go to jail for it. The ordinance has no religious exemption.

The original article by Jill Stanek did mention CBR's involvement. Gregg Cunningham, a 66-year-old former state representative, is the director of CBR. One of the organization's major missions appears to be showing graphic abortion pictures on college campuses, both Christian and secular, around the country.

To take a mundane recent example, he believes on Tuesday that Barack Obama is furious about what happened at the IRS, trusting in his sincerity when he says that all Americans should be outraged, but he believes on Wednesday that the agency was guilty of nothing more than "bad customer service" and that nothing of especial political importance happened. Because we all know how furious American Presidents tend to get about the bad service and "flawed processes" of federal bureaucracies. How many angry press conferences did Bill Clinton have on the terrible service rendered by the Department of Energy? I would estimate at least fifty, but I could be mistaken. Perhaps others could correct my recollection.

Wrote Cummings, “I am … a proponent of patient self-determination. I believe and teach that gays and lesbians have the right to be affirmed in their homosexuality and also have the right to seek help in changing their sexual orientation if that is their choice.”

Cummings reports he personally treated over 2,000 people with same-sex attraction, and his staff treated an additional 16,000.

He said that homosexual patients generally sought psychological help for one of three reasons: “to come to grips with their homosexual identity, to resolve relationship issues, or to change their homosexual orientation.”

Cummings wrote that while relatively few patients opted to try and change their sexual preference, those who did were deeply unhappy with their homosexual experiences, citing issues such as “the transient nature of relationships, disgust or guilt feelings about promiscuity, fear of disease,” and “the desire to have a traditional family.”

Of those who did try to change their preference, Cummings said "hundreds" were successful, going on to lead normal heterosexual lives.

Feel free to go and read the story and watch the video. Then you can read Biola's response and any associated links. Here is my take on the story, in no particular order:

--Biola does appear to have lots of things that its faculty does and that the school as an institution does for the pro-life cause. That is undeniable and admirable. At the same time, it seems that Diana (the nursing student) got to her fourth year of a nursing degree at Biola without knowing about the reality of abortion. How did that happen? Also, when she set up her pro-life display, she claims that she encountered hostile students. If we assume (and I'll admit that I do assume) that this means some pro-choice students, how did that happen? Biola should be concerned that it is not succeeding in passing on the pro-life message and the truth about abortion to its students. That should be a priority for the institution, not asserting in heavy-handed fashion its authority to block the display of graphic pro-life signs on campus.

--It has been suggested to me that Diana is lying when she says that she didn't know that she wasn't allowed to display the graphic signs. Let's keep this straight. She admits that she knew she was breaking school rules by displaying the graphic poster sign the second time after having failed to negotiate permission to do so. She says only that the first time, after she got permission to set up a table with information about abortion, she was surprised to be told that she needed separate, special permission to display her signs along with the table. This is entirely plausible. Apparently she went through procedures and was given permission for the table but was then told that this permission didn't cover signs displayed at the table! That is extremely odd and inefficient and is not something Diana would have been likely to understand by the natural light. If the school is going to approve displayed content, why not approve it all at once? Why require separate approval for a table and for a sign and then play "gotcha" with a student who displays a sign at the table without getting that particular sign approved? Of course a student who has jumped through the hoops and gotten permission for a table will assume that signs on the same topic may be displayed at or near the table. If the school officials wanted to see the signs first or know more about them before approving the display, they should have asked. See the next point...

--I have now read the link here to Biola's policy about what it calls "student forums" and also the form students have to fill out. Please note that this is the very section of the handbook to which Biola itself directs attention in its response to the incident. So we might expect to find something here about having to get each and every sign you want to display approved, separately from getting approval for a table, since this was allegedly what Diana had to do. Nope. Not a word. In fact, neither link has any clear discussion of content approval, though the form has two lines for "type of event/event details." While I understand that Biola is a private organization and therefore is within its rights to exercise "prior restraint" on speech, and while I understand that it does in fact exercise this prior restraint by engaging in content pre-approval, it looks like the claim that Diana needed separate permission for a table and for a sign with the table is not supported by the school's own documentation. In other words, it looks suspiciously like such a "rule" was made up ex post facto after the administrators got complaints about her graphic anti-abortion signs and were looking for an excuse to rescind the permission which they regretted having granted for her table! If we're to talk about whose honesty is called into question by this aspect of the incident, it isn't Diana's.

First is last month’s Atlantic with a lengthy treatment by Charles C. Mann of the astounding transformations in the world of fossil fuel extraction, refinement, distribution, and perpetuity. One might according to several precepts read, in bald summary, the meaning and importance of this article: the precept that moderate liberals have at last awakened to what’s going on and no longer stand athwart science and engineering and economic development; the precept that human projections and predictions are, in the industrial enterprise of the cleverest animal on this planet, the creature called man, an amusing but usually idle pastime; or merely the precept that, by golly, man is a clever creature.

Speaking of earthly creatures, who can match on the level of majesty and mystery, on the level of defiance and generosity, the elephant? It appears to me, having taken my time (read: lollygagged) through this small book of an essay by The New Atlantis Managing Editor Caitrin Nicol, that the answer to that question is None. The elephant is a source of unending fascination, ably adumbrated here. If you thought this subject could not support sixty pages of careful elaboration, you thought wrong.

Not necessarily. See here. (Emphasis added.)

A special meeting has been scheduled for the stated purpose of increasing awareness and understanding that American Muslims are not the terrorists some have made them out to be in social media and other circles.

“Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society” will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 4, at the Manchester-Coffee County Conference Center, 147 Hospitality Blvd.

Special speakers for the event will be Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Kenneth Moore, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville Division.

[snip]

Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.

“This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian told The News Monday. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”

Does that sound a mite threatening? It's obviously supposed to.

But I bet you never would have guessed that one of the most explicit examples of a test act in the United States would be for school children.

Things that were not a surprise: (1) the word “conservative” was used almost as frequently as “Republican.” Here in this state, the GOP party faithful are not in the least bit afraid of being tarred with the C word. It was, actually, a significant conservative success to hold a convention rather than a primary, as the primary tends (around here) to allow the conservative vote be split between 4 good conservatives, and the plurality vote ends up going to the “moderate” RINO who can garner 30% of the vote in a primary (in part because the primary does not require voters to be Republican to weigh in on the Republican candidate – you can weigh in on either party’s candidates).

Cromwell: Now, Sir Thomas, you stand on your silence.

Sir Thomas More: I do.

Cromwell: But, gentlemen of the jury, there are many kinds of silence. Consider first the silence of a man who is dead. Let us suppose we go into the room where he is laid out, and we listen: what do we hear? Silence. What does it betoken, this silence? Nothing; this is silence pure and simple. But let us take another case. Suppose I were to take a dagger from my sleeve and make to kill the prisoner with it; and my lordships there, instead of crying out for me to stop, maintained their silence. That would betoken! It would betoken a willingness that I should do it, and under the law, they will be guilty with me. So silence can, according to the circumstances, speak! Let us consider now the circumstances of the prisoner's silence. The oath was put to loyal subjects up and down the country, and they all declared His Grace's title to be just and good. But when it came to the prisoner, he refused! He calls this silence. Yet is there a man in this court - is there a man in this country! - who does not know Sir
Thomas More's opinion of this title?

Crowd in court gallery: No!

Cromwell: Yet how can this be? Because this silence betokened, nay, this silence was, not silence at all, but most eloquent denial!

Sir Thomas More: Not so. Not so, Master Secretary. The maxim is "Qui tacet consentire": the maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent". If therefore you wish to construe what my silence betokened, you must construe that I consented, not that I denied.

Cromwell: Is that in fact what the world construes from it? Do you pretend that is what you wish the world to construe from it?

Sir Thomas More: The world must construe according to its wits; this court must construe according to the law.

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you."

"I apologise that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments – they don't care about you."

"The only reasons we killed this man ... is because Muslims are dying daily...This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth."

One thing has already happened: Cameron & co. have informed the world that this has nothing to do with Islam. O-kay.

Look for Stockholm Syndrome to start next. "Gee, maybe they're right. Maybe if we worked to reduce collateral damage more in Muslim lands these things wouldn't happen. Maybe it really is our fault." Think I'm kidding? Read Alan Noble (a Baylor graduate student) on the subject of the Boston bombing. But don't say I didn't warn you: Loss of brain cells may ensue.

Words are, in fact, inadequate to express what is going on right now. The jihadis are merciless, and the response of the West is pathetic. Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the UK about some reporter who tweeted that the murderers were "of Muslim appearance." He has since apologized.

If you read some headline that said “Human Cloning is One Step Nearer,” or something like that, it's a lie. Human cloning has now occurred. An article has just been published by scientists working in Oregon describing successful human embryo cloning followed by killing.

If you read an article that said, or that you understood to be saying, “For the first time, scientists have converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells without killing embryos,” that's a lie. In fact, it's a lie twice. The first lie is that the scientists in the recent cloning event reprogrammed skin cells into embryonic stem cells without killing embryos. Actually, they did create embryos, by cloning. Then they killed them. Then they harvested and studied their embryonic stem cells just as they would with IVF embryos they were killing for ESCR.

The second lie is that this is the “first time” anyone has done anything that could or should be called “making skin cells into embryonic stem cells.” As a matter of fact, that's a pretty darned good description of making iPSCs, which are embryonic-like stem cells that can be made without either creating or killing embryos. It's been done already for quite a while now, but the leftists don't like iPSCs as much as ESCs just because no embryo-killing is required for them and just because cloning is more sexy and is opposed by The Right, so they'd rather mis-describe clone-and-kill and make it sound like clone-and-kill is the first-time ethical breakthrough that was actually accomplished already in the reprogramming of skin cells to iPSCs without any cloning. Are you following?

The above news-story sentence in quotation marks is not taken directly from the Fox news story. It is a combination of the implications of several sentences. The actual sentences go like this. Please notice how incredibly misleading the second one is.

In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells – via a technique called nuclear transfer. [snip] Fortunately, the SCNT method bypasses these ethical dilemmas, as the donated eggs are never actually fertilized. [snip] This [keeping the cell in metaphase longer] keeps the process from stalling and encourages the cell to ultimately develop into a stem cell.

Pro-lifers reading quickly might be excused if they think this was some sort of ethical as well as scientific breakthrough. The story is an instance of shameful and deceptive obscurantism.

@PPact (Planned Parenthood), May 13.

(H/T James Toranto.)

Really, there's not in my lifetime been any bunch of people more dependent for their sustenance upon euphemism and, more than that, upon the thing not said, than the ghouls of the abortion industry and the advocates who serve as their public face. This is also noticeable in the fact that its non-public advocates are such reliable liars and systematic dissemblers.

And to think, the phrase "collateral damage" was so loudly mocked and criticized by the professional high-dudgeon specialists of the American left back in 2001-03.