MADISON, Wis. – Apparently it’s okay for publicly-funded educators to attack Christianity, because they’re exercising “academic freedom.”

But it’s not acceptable for instructors to exercise that freedom in defense of Christianity, according to the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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Last year, Polk State University Professor Lance Russum was criticized by some for expressing his anti-Christian bias in the classroom.

He was accused of giving a Christian student several failing grades for responding to essay questions with Christian-based answers.

Russum also offended some by openly writing opinions on course materials like, “What we take to be the ‘truth’ is just the retelling of the myths of early civilization. The god [sic] of Christianity/Islam/Judaism are [sic] a mixture of the god(s) myths of the Mesopotamians.

“The point of this is not to ‘bash’ any religion, we should NEVER favor one over the another, they all come from the same sources, HUMAN IMAGINATION.”

The university defended Polk. Donald Painter, the dean of academic affairs, wrote the following:

“I think we deal with controversial, sensitive and hot-button issues, and I fully respect that in talking about them in an academic context people may feel a little raw about it, and it may touch on their values — I have great respect for that. At the same time, it’s important that we have the ability to freely inquire about these subjects and discuss them, as in, ‘We know this is the popular worldview, so let’s look at the other perspectives.’ That’s at the core of what we do.”

Russum was quoted as saying he had “such gratitude for the way in which [the college has] rallied around the idea of academic freedom. It’s just a testament to what Polk State stands for — diverse people with diverse beliefs being heard.”

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In another case, Dr. Deandre Poole of Florida Atlantic University raised an uproar when she asked students to write the name “Jesus” in bold letters on a piece of paper, then stomp on it.

The university defended Poole, stating that “faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate.”

If that’s the accepted standard for instruction in publicly-funded universities, why doesn’t it also apply to publicly-funded K-12 schools?

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, which spends a lot of time and money pressuring public schools to remove all references to Christianity, recently boasted that it has convinced a Texas school district to stop teachers from exposing students to Christian-themed movies.

The FFRF website described the situation this way:

“In Central Heights High School in Nacogdoches, Texas, two teachers showed their students extremely questionable films. In a ninth grade health class, an instructor screened ‘God’s Not Dead,’ a movie blatantly Christian and proselytizing in nature. And in a ninth grade science class, another teacher, remarking to his students that he didn’t believe in evolution, played ‘Expelled: Intelligence Not Allowed,’ an intelligent design propaganda work that the New York Times described as ‘a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.’

“FFRF contacted the Central Heights Independent School District in May to alert school officials that the teachers were out of line.

“FFRF’s perseverance paid off. Just this week, it received a letter from the Central Heights Independent School District’s law firm stating that district staff members will be trained on First Amendment issues to educate them better on the separation of state and church.

“FFRF appreciates the assurance.”

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF, was quoted as saying “We are glad that the district is going to enforce its policies and stop miseducating its captive audience.”

A captive audience? The students in those classes were given the option of skipping the movies, according to the FFRF’s own press release.

The truly captive audience was stuck in Russum’s classroom at Polk State University, where students were forced to read his comment that all belief in God derives from “human imagination.”

Gaylor went on to say that “the onus shouldn’t be on us to remind school districts about their constitutional obligations.”

What obligations? We assume she’s referring to the section of the First Amendment that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The teachers in those Texas classrooms are not Congress, and they were not establishing an official state religion. That would require an act of Congress, which would be clearly unconstitutional.

The teachers are simply “diverse people” who were expressing “diverse points of view,” which Professor Russum calls for in classrooms.

Or does that freedom only apply to instructors with anti-Christian points of view?