“We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity,” wrote Patricia Januzzi, in a Facebook post in which she warned that same-sex marriage is part of an “agenda” that aims toward the “slow extinction” of Western civilization.
Ms. Januzzi is a teacher at Immaculata High School, a private Catholic school in New Jersey. While I am not Catholic, I am sufficiently acquainted with their doctrines on marriage and the family to conclude that Ms. Januzzi said nothing in her rant with which the Pope would disagree. And having spent the past several months researching radical feminism, I can say with absolute certainty that the “agenda” is exactly what Ms. Januzzi says it is. But the 21st-Century Thought Police can’t let the truth be spoken:
SOMERVILLE, N.J. — An anti-gay rant by a religion teacher at a Catholic high school in New Jersey is drawing the ire of alumni across the country, including a former Real Housewives of New Jersey cast member and New-Jersey-raised Susan Sarandon.
On her now-deleted Facebook profile earlier this week, the veteran private Catholic school teacher said gays or gay activists “want to reengineer western civ (sic) into a slow extinction” as part of their “agenda.”
“We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity!!!!!” wrote Immaculata High School teacher Patricia Jannuzzi, adding that the argument that gays are protected under the 14th Amendment is “bologna.” . . .
Let me interrupt here to quote more of Ms. Januzzi’s post. She was reacting emotionally to a story (“Crass: Gay Activist Tweets THIS To Ben Carson Following CNN Interview”) that she linked on her Facebook page, and her point was not very clearly made. She said gay activists, after using the “born that way” argument to gain status under the 14th Amendment “equal protection” clause, will then “argue everyone should be able to choose” homosexuality. Anyone familiar with feminist theory knows that radical lesbians have never accepted the “born that way” argument, instead advocating lesbianism as a “challenge to male supremacy and its basic institution of heterosexuality,” to quote Professor Sheila Jeffreys. This feminist perspective was celebrated in a 1973 song by Alix Dobkin, “Every Woman Can Be a Lesbian.”
The radical “choice” view of sexuality advocated by lesbian feminists is seldom heard from gay males, who usually describe their homosexual desires as an uncontrollable urge. However, one finds across the spectrum of the LGBT rainbow a unanimous consensus on what we might call the Compulsory Approval Doctrine:
No one can ever be permitted to express a personal aversion or moral objection to homosexual behavior.
Disapproval is synonymous with “hate,” according to gay activists, and the cultural consequence of the Compulsory Approval Doctrine is to stigmatize heterosexuality as an expression of prejudice. Many gay people have convinced themselves that the “straight” person’s rejection of homosexual behavior is implicit proof of homophobia — an irrational fear — so that all heterosexuals are basically viewed as ignorant bigots afflicted with neurotic sexual repression. And if you dare cite religious injunctions against homosexuality, you thereby prove that you are certainly a hater. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The Compulsory Approval Doctrine of the gay-rights movement is exemplified by the thug mob reaction to Mrs. Januzzi:
The school has since forced Jannuzzi to take down her Facebook page, which was no longer visible Wednesday evening, but not before others took screenshots of the rant and shared it on social media.
Immaculata principal Jean Kline on Wednesday distanced her school from Jannuzzi’s comments and said that “through an 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.”
In her statement, Kline said the school “takes this situation very seriously.”
“We are dedicated to creating a school environment that promotes mutual respect and provides a challenging academic program, rooted in the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.”
It remains to be seen whether the school’s response will allay reaction by alumni, some of whom remember losing a gay classmate to suicide.
Former Real Housewives cast member Greg Bennett, who graduated from Immaculata in 2004 and who had Jannuzzi as a teacher his senior year, shared the screenshot of Jannuzzi’s post on his Twitter account, asking his 165,000 followers to sign a petition addressed to school administrators calling “for action to be taken and hate speech to stop at Immaculata.” . . .
Earlier on Wednesday, Sarandon, who graduated from Edison High School, shared a letter written by her nephew, Scott Lyons, to Jannuzzi, his former teacher at the high school.
“You have a responsibility as a teacher to lead by example and the words that you have been throwing out there are detrimental to the well being and health of the youth that you inspire,” Lyons, who has an adopted son with his husband, writes. “I am certain that the pope himself would take issue with your extreme point of view on homosexuality.” . . .
“I left this school after being told in religion class I must live a celibate single life if I had gay ‘feelings,’ ” writes Doug Bednarczyk of Marlton, N.J. “Around the same time, a gay classmate committed suicide.”
Lucas Bernardo, of Philadelphia, says he was 16 when he took a class taught by Jannuzzi.
“I didn’t feel comfortable in her class with the negative messages about gay and lesbian people she was preaching to us,” he writes. “I remember arguing with her about such topics and being in total disbelief that such blatant hate could be taught in a religion class.”
Read the whole thing. The Thought Police never bothered to disprove what Ms. Januzzi wrote. They offered no evidence to contradict her claims. Instead, they denounced her for engaging in “hate speech,” having an “extreme point of view,” teaching “blatant hate” and, they insinuated, Ms. Januzzi is responsible for teenagers committing suicide.
Look: I’m old enough to remember when a boy could be suspended from public school if his hair was long enough to touch his shirt collar in back. I remember when a girl could get kicked off the cheerleading squad if she engaged in PDA (public display of affection) by holding hands with her boyfriend. There was a time — and not really that long ago, either — when young people could not demand approval from their elders, and in fact teenagers were constantly subjected to lectures of adult disapproval for their adolescent wildness. Yet we did not commit suicide, nor did we organize petitions to get our teachers fired because they disapproved of us, inter alia, smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin.
Our parents and teachers told us we were hellbound heathens and, once we grew up and looked back on our misspent youth, most of us agreed they were right. God forbid any of my kids should ever go wild like I went wild in the ’70s. America was still a free country back then, and adults weren’t expected to tiptoe around lest they bruise the fragile self-esteem of a Special Snowflake. Back then, totalitarianism was a threat posed by the Soviet Union. Now the totalitarians are here among us, organizing to suppress dissent, punishing expression of opinions contrary to those of the progressive elite. It is not yet illegal to speak truth, however, and I will exercise my First Amendment right to say this: Damn the Thought Police. Damn them all to hell.
“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786
“If you only stand up for speech you approve of, you’re a hack. If you only stand up for speech that everyone approves of, you’re a coward.”
— Glenn Reynolds, 2015
The “slow extinction” of Western civilization is beginning to accelerate. If a Catholic teacher at a Catholic school is not free to express Catholic teaching, who among us is truly free?
The Thought Police are everywhere now, monitoring our opinions, so we can only think what Our Moral Superiors™ want us to think.
(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)
