Saturday, May 14, 2022

Is it OK to Disparage Christians? Of Course! Williams College Student Alice-Henry Carnell Sets Us Straight


WILLIAMSTOWN, MA - It looks like a new generation of Williams College students is teaching their peers that bashing whites or males or Christians is socially acceptable. This trend is particularly horrifying when we take into account the violence practiced against Christians around the globe. 

"In raw numbers, Christians are the most persecuted religious group on Earth and have been for years," writes Jeff Jacoby. Evidence is all too abundant — from the steady disappearance of Christian communities in the Middle East to the monstrous repression of Christians in North Korea, from the barbaric penalties imposed on Christians in Pakistan to the public lynching of Christians in India, from the bombing of Catholic churches in the Philippines to the jihadist pogroms against Coptic worshipers in Egypt. Anti-Christian bigotry is a leading cause of bloodshed in our time. It should be getting more attention than it does." 

"According to Open Doors, a California-based non-governmental organization that assists endangered Christian communities worldwide," he writes, "one Christian is killed, on average, every two hours in Nigeria. In 2021, the confirmed death toll was 4,650, making Nigeria the world's deadliest nation for Christians for the second consecutive year."

Nevertheless, at least one leftwing student leader is eager to disparage Christianity in a manner that she believes would be offensive if similar language targets other religions. 

The latest purveyor of this vile, potentially lethal perspective is Alice Carnell '22.5. She is a member of the Williams Chapter of Youth Democratic Socialists of America. In an opinion piece in the Williams Record, she wrote: "Like expressing frustration at white people or at men, expressing frustration at Christianity is expressing frustration at systems that have perpetrated massive harm to those not in their subgroups and at the privileges that people in these dominant groups gain from their membership."

So, abusing other people (expressing frustration) is perfectly okay, perhaps even a socially good thing, provided you carefully pick your targets. 

Carnell has a bit of power at Williams College. As I understand it, she is employed as a teaching assistant in the English Department. I am assuming she uses this platform to teach other young people the proper targets for their ire. Here is how she tells the story. 

"Last Thursday, a group of white men passed out miniature bibles outside of Paresky and on Spring Street. Like several people on social media posted, I thought it was the College giving out journals or planners so I took one. When I saw it was a Bible, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I am very outwardly queer and trans, blur the binary, and tend to be perceived somewhere between “dyke” and “fag.” While there are many Christians who support queer people and many queer Christians, in general, people who pass out bibles on street corners do not tend to like people like me. I looked into the organization stamped on the Bible, Gideons International, and felt fairly certain that these particular men were in that subgroup. They are an evangelical society of Christian men only (their wives are — and I quote — “auxiliary”).

"Many people on campus – including me – expressed discomfort online at this new campus presence. In response to these comments, someone posted on Unmasked, “Not a practicing Christian, but uncomfortable with the way people disparage Christians on this campus,” which launched a 62-comment-long thread. There were a lot of comments that boiled down to: “If you said X thing you said about Christianity about Islam or Judaism it would be Islamophobic or antisemitic. So why is it different for Christianity?”

She asserts that "It is different." 

Wow. This must come as a shock to the families of the Christians in Nigeria being slaughtered at a rate of two an hour. 

In this regard, Alice Carnell is now in competition for the Mary Baker Eddy Hypocrite of the Year award. Alice insists that Judaism and Islam should be protected from bashing while carving out permission to bash Christianity. 

Fun Fact: Ms. Eddy was addicted to morphine and availed herself of medical attention even as she told her adherents to rely on faith-healing instead.

"Criticizing Christianity is different than criticizing other religions," Alice reports. Why? Carnell says that hatred of Islam or Judaism is based on racism while hatred of Christianity is not. For this reason, "...it is impossible to assert that critiquing Christianity (or even bashing it) is comparable to Islamophobia or antisemitism." 

"I posted a version of this op-ed on Unmasked," she wrote, "but in a time of intense anonymity on this campus, it felt important to stake my name to what I wrote." As far as I can tell, Unmasked is an app that has a mental health focus. It is intended to normalize vulnerability and fight the stigma surrounding mental health. It was originally started in January 2020 by folks from Dartmouth College. 

It looks to me that the real reason for her William Record opinion piece was her palpable fear that way too many of her fellow students are uncomfortable with the way "people disparage Christians on this campus." To them, for very good reasons, bashing Christians looks exactly like Islamophobia or antisemitism. 

To put all of this in context, Alice Carnell '22.5 is part of a long line of social justice activists including her grandmother Sue Carnell who served on the board of the Friends Journal, a national Quaker publication in Philadelphia. As far as I can tell, her father is J. Kevin Carnell who was also the trustee and past chairman of the Friends School of Baltimore. Her mother appears to be Tea (Teresa) Carnell who works as an Assistant Attorney General at the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO), Maryland Venture Fund. As far as we can tell, she took off a semester and called herself an on-pause junior on her website

According to Alice, she has had to process her religious inheritance. As she points out: "I come from a Quaker-Jewish family and those beliefs shape me deeply. Those beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum. An important part of being Jewish for me is criticizing the State of Israel and the settler-colonial violence it perpetuates. An important part of being a Quaker for me is grappling with the violent Christian histories Quakerism exists in."

For an example of one of Alice Carnell's anti-police rants, check out this article. To see how her article was picked up and used elsewhere, see this post at Alive in Truth

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After battling Christianity, Alice is at war with her own breasts too. In a recent blog post, she shared that she is saving money for her top surgery. In MA, top surgery - that is the removal of one's breasts, will set you back about $3,000 to $10,000. As one might expect, it is cheaper to surgically remove breasts than to surgically add them on, or add them back on I suppose if you made a mistake.  

On one website, I discovered that the cost of breast amputation or if you prefer FTM (female to male) top surgery is "dependent upon your contouring goals as well as your current physical condition." If you are not an already bosomy gal, then you might be able to keep your nipples as they perform the artfully labeled "subcutaneous mastectomy." But, have no fear, if your breasts are quite large, you can still supplement your subcutaneous mastectomy with "free nipple grafting." This delightful add-on service comes, of course, with a higher price tag. 

Hopefully, someone will expose Alice to the potentially unpleasant side effects of subcutaneous mastectomies including numbness, the lack of data on the long-term effects of hormone replacement therapy, the reality of botched operations, and of course hideous scarring. A true friend will also bring up the issue of detransition and transition regret. As far as I can tell, the rate of transition regret stretches from 1% to 8%. But, given the leftist rage for trans* status, I suspect the number is much higher than that. Getting this decision wrong may be as one lady put it, "the worst decision of my life." 

If she reads up on the details of bottom surgery, then she might rethink the whole matter. Apparently, one of the bothers of phalloplasty is that you are going to need an operation every 10 years or so to replace the erectile device. This is a device that creates a pseudo-erection. Sometimes, unfortunately, the erectile device can puncture the flesh it is meant to erectile. Yuk. For perhaps good reason, those who undergo these ugly surgeries according to one research effort are 19 times more likely to commit suicide. Another paper I found indicates that sex reassignment surgery has no impact on mental health or suicides. As such, the suicide rate for people after this surgery is still way above the average population. Like others, I think encouraging this sort of nonsense is simply aiding and abetting a mental disorder. 

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In the meantime, if any student at Williams College would like to share with us more about the way Christians are disparaged at the school, Williams Liberty is more than happy to give them a platform to share their views here - either privately, publicly, anonymous, or not. For the safety of whites or males or Christians at Williams College, it is important to push back against those who use their cruel ideologies to justify expressing frustration at their young, innocent victims.  

At the very least, it would be a good idea to point out the hypocrisy of the leftist students at Williams College who fail to protest the murder of thousands of Christians a year at the hands of violent, adherent, and contemporary Islamists.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist and a former Williams College professor. He is an occasional contributor at American Thinker, Breitbart, Front Page, PJMedia and WND.

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