A teacher for the drama program at Bellingham Washington High School has issued a formal apology after the awards ceremony for the program included profanity, a box of sex toys and even jokes about pedophile priests.
Teri Grimes, a teacher of over 30 years who is scheduled to retire at the end of this school year, reportedly used profanity and told a joke about a priest wanting sex with children.
A parent in the audience sent an e-mail to KOMO television about the events that occurred at the ceremony in the school’s auditorium. The woman was there with her 17-year-old daughter who will graduate on June 6th. The television station kept the parent and child’s names secret until after graduation.
The event featured sexually oriented awards, including giving a sex toy to the boy who voted as the “horniest stud.”
“I deeply apologize for some very inappropriate comments and actions made during our drama students’ end-of-the-year awards ceremony,” Grimes wrote in her apology. “This is not representative of our students who take such great pride in their school and respect one another. Much of the evening was a great celebration of their work. However, as a teacher and the club’s leader, I take full responsibility and am extremely sorry.”
San Francisco University officials are trying to downplay a report that one of their professors used taxpayer dollars to fly to the middle east and meet with various terrorist groups.
A non-profit group discovered during a request through the California Public Records Act that Professor Rabab Abdulhadi received more than $7,000 to fly to Jordan and the West Bank. The professor had initially been scheduled to speak at a conference at American University in Lebanon but was removed from the speaking list. She still took the trip.
Professor Abdulhadi then met with Leila Khaled, a convicted terrorist hijacker and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terror group responsible for almost 160 bombings, assaults and assassinations. She also met with Sheikh Raed Salah, who funds the terrorist group Hamas and served a two-year terror related prison term.
The documents say the meetings with terrorists were set before the University provided the funding for the trip.
Professor Abdulhadi has spoken at various anti-Israeli events around the world.
Professor Abdulhadi did not return calls to Fox News.
Retired General Jerry Boykin is no stranger to battles. A 36-year veteran including 13 years in the elite Delta Force, has been involved in situations including the 1980 Iran hostage rescue attempt and the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.
Yet he sees one of the greatest battles ahead of him: standing up for Christ in a society that is facing a dark spiritual time. A time he believes could bring the end of the nation.
“We’re going to wind up exactly like these other great empires, which only lasted on an average about 200 years,” he said. “We’re going to completely self-destruct. And you see the beginnings of that now.”
Boykin spoke to CBN and said that it’s critical for America to experience another Great Awakening that will bring the nation back to God before it’s too late. He said that the two previous Awakenings led to “extraordinary things” happened in the world.
Boykin said that Christians couldn’t count on politicians to save the country.
“Me plus the Holy Spirit: that’s a majority,” he said.
An expert in the field of addiction to pornography says that pornography in America has reached the level of a public health crisis.
Dr. Sharon Cooper said that the impact that pornography has on the development of children who are routinely exposed to the sexual images. The images that they see are hampering their ability to form healthy connections to sexuality and the proper role of men and women in relationships.
“It’s a very severe issue in our country,” Dr. Cooper told The Christian Post.
Dr. Cooper was speaking at a summit of the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation. The event, sponsored by the anti-porn groups Morality in Media and Pornharms.com, was aimed at raising the awareness of the harm of pornography on youth.
Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College, spoke about performers who are considered “mainstream” in America like Miley Cyrus or Beyonce whose performances contain elements of adult entertainment. She said the ease by which those performances are accepted by Christians helps create the highly sexualized culture that harms youth.
Dines also says the problem is now so large that it cannot be stopped on an individual basis.
“There’s nothing you can do on an individual level really. The idea of it being a public health issue is that you have to come together collectively as a group,” said Dines.
“This has become such a public health crisis that we have to bring together groups who normally would not come together to figure out what does a public health approach look like in dealing with the harms of pornography.”
A statue of the Virgin Mary was taken from its platform, decapitated and thrown on the ground in front of a Knights of Columbus building.
Long Island police say the “Statue of the Blessed Mother” was vandalized sometime between Tuesday lunchtime and Wednesday morning.
“Someone’s got to have hate in their heart,” Knights of Columbus Grand Knight Austin Cannon told CBS New York. “Members equate this to maybe a person of the Jewish faith coming out and finding a swastika on the side of a building. The Blessed Mother is an integral part of our faith, and to find her statue pushed over really upset our members.”
The statue that was destroyed was a replacement for one that was damaged last July by vandals. Police say that three separate Knights of Columbus locations have had statues vandalized in the last year.
The attacks have done nothing to discourage the Knights.
“You can break it as many times as you want,” added Knights of Columbus Deputy Grand Knight James Ruescher. “But at the end of the day it’ll always be bigger and better.”
The planned Satanic ceremony at Harvard University was canceled after an outcry from students and alumni.
The Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club announced on Monday it would not hold the event because negotiations between themselves and the bar where it was scheduled broke down without an agreement. The Club says they were unable to find another suitable location.
The Club said the New York group Satanic Temple would still hold a mass because they wanted to “reaffirm their respect for the Satanic faith.”
The ceremonies held by the Satanic Temple are parodies of the rites of the Catholic Church.
Almost 400 Harvard students and over 100 alumni had signed a petition opposing the event being held on the campus.
“This form of satanic worship not only ridicules the central practice of Catholicism, the Mass, but it also mocks and offends all who have faith in Christ,” the petition reads. “Far from being an event that promotes an understanding of “cultural practices,” it, in fact, promotes contempt for the Catholic faith and religion generally. We are Catholics, other Christians, and supporters of genuine tolerance and civility, and we are offended and outraged this event has been permitted to take place at Harvard.”
Harvard University is holding a mass to celebrate Satan.
The Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club said the invitiation for a service by the Satanic Temple of New York is being done as an “educational” event and not intended to advocate for Satanic worship by the University.
“We are hosting a reenactment of a historical event known as a Black Mass,” the HECSC said in a statement. “The performance is designed to be educational and is preceded by a lecture that provides the history, context, and origin of the Black Mass. While a piece of bread is used in the reenactment, the performance unequivocally does not include a consecrated host. Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices. This performance is part of a larger effort to explore religious facets that continue to influence contemporary culture.”
The Catholic community announced their deep opposition to the idea of open Satanic worship at Harvard and said that people need to be aware of the very real danger associated with underestimating the power of Satan.
St. Paul’s Church near Harvard will be holding a special mass during the same time asking for God to protect those who could be placed in harm’s way by the Satanists.
A pro-life student organization at the University of Miami had a display destroyed by vandals.
The display showed multiple renderings of graduation caps to represent the 370,000 Americans who would have graduated from college this year had their lives not been ended through abortion. The display used 370 caps, each representing 1,000 murdered children.
University President and former Clinton Administration official Donna Shalala condemned the vandalism.
“I am sorry your display was vandalized,” Shalala wrote in an e-mail posted on the UM Respect Life’s website. “That behavior is unacceptable at the University of Miami. I have asked our division of student affairs and campus police to investigate. You and your fellow students have every right to express your views.”
The display was one of four nationwide that were reported vandalized. In addition to the University of Miami, displays were destroyed at George Washington University, Winthrop University and in Chicago’s Daley Plaza.
The deadly South Korean ferry disaster has been found to be the result of illegally loaded cargo shifting during the journey.
The death toll climbed to over 260 as divers continue to bring the bodies of the dead from inside the ferry. The official death toll does not include one diver who died after problems with his oxygen supply while on a recovery mission.
Investigators say that the ferry was loaded with double the amount of cargo allowed by maritime law. The cargo was also not tied down properly which broke free in the heavy surf and shifted left, toppling the ferry.
“The lashing devices that should have held cargo goods steady were loose, and some of the crew members did not even know” how to use them correctly, prosecutor Yang Joong-jin told reporters.
Police reportedly have arrested four employees of the ferry’s owner, Cheonghaejin Marine Company, and one of those in custody was a senior executive. Officials won’t say if the people arrested had a direct connection to the overloading of the ferry.
The ferry company reportedly had been overloading the ferry since March 2013 and earned almost three million dollars in additional profits with the illegal loads.
Reading, writing and denying the killing of over 6 million Jews. That’s apparently part of a California schools’ curriculum after parents discovered an assignment telling their children to write papers denying the holocaust.
Rialto United School District assigned eighth grade students an assignment to “write an argumentative essay, based upon cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe [the Holocaust] was an actual event in history or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.”
The interim Superintendent of the District, Mohammed Islam, claimed that no offense was intended to Jewish members of the community or Jewish parents.
“The intent of the writing prompt was to exercise the use of critical thinking skills,” Islam wrote in a statement. “There was no offensive intent in the crafting of this assignment. We regret that the prompt was misinterpreted.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Associate Regional Director wrote the assignment had no benefit for students.
“It is ADL’s general position that an exercise asking students to question whether the Holocaust happened has no academic value,” Matthew Friedman wrote in a press release.
A district spokeswoman said the department that assigned the project will undergo cultural sensitivity training. The student’s assignment was canceled after public outrage.