Student Senator at Florida State U. Says He Was Removed for Holding Traditional Catholic Views
“The content of my messages was leaked and mischaracterized all over social media.”
Jack Denton claims he was removed from his position in student government at Florida State University for holding views which are not controversial, but simply Catholic.
He writes at the Daily Wire:
Cancel Culture Kicked Me Out of My College Job Simply Because I Was Catholic
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to rethink our lives and cancel various plans. Vacations have been canceled. Sports have been canceled. Classes have been canceled. But at my university, I soon found “cancel culture” taking this canceling to whole new level. I was removed from my job as Student Senate President at Florida State University because my peers and administrators decided to cancel my Catholic faith.
My story started on a bright day in early June. Though we were in the midst of the summer semester, I remained digitally engaged with my classmates during the pandemic, including those in the Catholic Student Union. In our Catholic GroupMe chat, one student shared a YouTube video that was soliciting donations and collecting ad revenue for several organizations, including the ACLU and BlackLivesMatter.com.
These two organizations take several positions that clearly conflict with Catholic doctrine. For example, the ACLU is so unabashedly pro-abortion that it is fighting Ohio’s law that protects unborn children from being aborted because of their disability status. BlackLivesMatter.com aims to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” where children are raised by a married mother and father. Both BlackLivesMatter.com and the ACLU also support radical secular theories on transgenderism.
I decided to politely point out my concerns to my classmates in the Catholic GroupMe chat. I realize that our nation is wrestling with very challenging issues on race right now, and the solutions to those issues are complex and unclear…
The content of my messages was leaked and mischaracterized all over social media. I had countless false accusations of “hate” and “discrimination” levied against me, and by extension, against Catholicism. Thousands of people signed a petition saying I was unfit to serve as Senate president. And less than a week later, an overwhelming majority of the Student Senate that I had worked so hard to serve succumbed to these demands, removing me strictly because of my Catholic beliefs.
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Comments
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Maybe all the Catholic schools exhibiting wokeness aren’t really Catholic at all.
#CINO
This happened at a public school, not a Catholic one. Which, honestly, is worse, from a legal perspective. In theory, the First Amendment is supposed to protect us from these sorts of things. Unfortunately, Wokeness has become the dogma that trumps all else.
The first amendment doesn’t protect an elected officer from being removed by the people who elected him in the first place, for any reason that seems fit to them. If the student senate decides that it doesn’t want to elect a Catholic president, or a black one or a Jewish one, it doesn’t have to, just as US voters have the right, if they choose, not to vote for a Catholic or Jewish or black presidential or congressional candidate.
However, if the student body elected him in the first place (unclear from the post) or he was appointed partly by the university administration, he has grounds for a religious discrimination lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. Which I would love to see. We’ve already seen the problem at FSU when a woman in the student Senate was hounded into withdrawing because of her support for Zionism.
The president of the student senate is obviously elected by that senate. And it has just unelected him, because it doesn’t like his Catholic views. Surely that’s its right, no matter how bigoted its motive. Anti-discrimination laws can’t apply here.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. All of the Florida schools I know are going this way, but I hate to see it at my alma mater.
I would like to see what he said in this group. I’d think that is important to see. I doubt it is anything bad, but it would help clear up the smear.