Not a Day Care Quotes

“If fascism ever comes to America", Ronald Reagan told Mike Wallace in 1975, "it will come in the name of liberalism". Indeed, ideological fascism has come in place of academic freedom, waiving the banners of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces on college campuses across the land. You must submit. You must agree. You must comply with the fasces--the acceptable bundle of ideas--or you will be silenced and expelled.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“The First Amendment protects our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to practice religion, to peacefully assemble, and the right to petition the government. This is true tolerance as defined by our founding documents. This is the right of all American citizens. Does the right of free speech end on college campuses of higher learning? Does it end when you step into a designated "safe space" at your local university? Does it end if your choice of words is construed to be a "trigger warning" when you walk into a classroom?

The answer obviously should be no. Unfortunately, the answer today on most college campuses is yes. And take this warning seriously: it won't end there.

The commentator Andrew Sullivan has noted the student anti-free-speech movement "manifests itself . . . almost as a religion". He continues:

"It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained--and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., "check your privilege", and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. This sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you're a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral . . . your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can't reason with heresy. You have to ban it".

Ironically, Christians, and others committed to the free expression of ideas, are the ones who are often accused of trying to force our beliefs on others. But that's not the case. Because we believe in objective truth, we believe reason and a robust exchange of ideas, with good, healthy debate can guide us to the truth. It is the radical Left that denies objective truth and therefore always relies on forced compliance and fascist tactics.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“Is it possible that the best way to support the disadvantaged and underprivileged is to embrace unity rather than promote division and to welcome everyone into the family of Americans without hyphenating their identity?”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“If we are the intentional design of an intelligent creator, then we have a purpose, a destiny, and a way in which to live our lives in order to fulfill that purpose. If we are nothing more than products of happenstance and chance, then we have no ultimate purpose and meaning and no standard to guide the way we are to live our lives. Morality becomes meaningless and right and wrong are nothing more than social constructs—subject to the whim and opinion of those who position themselves to have the most power.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“There is a huge difference between the conservative's fight for unity and the progressive's attempt to force everyone else to comply. One is freedom, while one is fascism. One celebrates the whole, while one condemns those who are not part of the group. One confronts, while one coddles. One thrives by rule of love, while one exists by the tyranny of the gang. One produces mature adults, the other produces self-absorbed snowflakes.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“It is only by dying to self that any human being will ever find his true identity. It isn't found in race or gender. It isn't found in personal grievances or our narcissistic infatuation with self. We are neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. We are human beings, and selfless unity in Christ is the First Thing.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“[Many are] too ready to argue that comfort is more important than repentance and support is more important than challenge . . . to coddle and enable more--to confront and challenge less.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“According [to] the Pew Research Center, American Community Survey (ACS), and Decennial Census data, less than half of the kids in the United States live at home with mom and dad. Only 46 percent of children in the U.S. under the age of eighteen live in a home with two married heterosexual parents who are in their first marriage. In 1960, that number was 73 percent. The trend is far, far worse among the African-American population.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“When Donald Trump's crude comments about women surfaced during his presidential campaign, these progressive university folk were among the first to criticize him. The same people who tell their students anything goes when it comes to sex acted offended in order to score political points. I'm not defending his comments--not at all--but since when did they care about the adverse [e]ffects of objectifying women? Why should Trump's comments come as a surprise when many of those same professors champion "sex weeks" on their respective campuses, replete with seminars that include porn stars and even prostitutes as guest speakers? Doesn't the feigned shock expressed by the progressive Left seem just a bit disingenuous when we know as empirical fact this same faculty has no compunction at all about using similar vulgar language in their classes and would quickly belittle and shout down any "prudish" conservative such as me who tried to say otherwise?

Everything, from their celebration of The Vagina Monologues to the cover of Cosmo to the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and nearly every beer commercial known to man, unapologetically portrays females as literal objects of sport to be enjoyed first and foremost for their body parts. So why the feigned outrage over Trump's comments?”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“It is clear that some absolutes cannot be tested in a tube and yet must be affirmed. For example, it is clear racism is bad, rape is wrong, and the Holocaust should have been avoided. Surely no "thinking person" such as Dr. Stenger would deny such empirical facts, even if such truths cannot be derived from the laboratory or a Petri dish? It is also clear that it takes about as much "foolish faith and vanity" to believe nature's design has no designer as it does to suppose a painting has no painter, a building has no builder, a book has no writer, or a watch has no watchmaker.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“Safety is synonymous with comfort, and comfort is antithetical to confrontation and growth. I have never grown in my life without being disciplined, confronted, or challenged. I have never matured and become better at much of anything, unless I was first made to feel dissonance and discomfort. Safe spaces will encourage students to do nothing more than what they already do and become nothing more than what they already are. If each of us is "good" enough, then feeling safe in that goodness may be fine. But, if we are hell-bent in our sin, then true love and good education calls for someone to stand in our way and say, "This may make you fell threatened and unsafe, but you're not as good as you think you are. Life isn't about you. You need to stop your bad behavior and think about others more than yourself!".

The irony is that, while today's students are quick to deny the reality of sin, at the same time they are crying to be protected from ideas and actions they see as "sinful"--things they don't want to hear; things they don't want to see or experience; things and people they believe to be wrong. This new world of "safe spaces" is very much an "us" versus "them" paradigm. Consequently, because today's post-mods and millennials see themselves as sinless, anyone who dares disagree with them is sinful. In an effort to protect themselves from anyone and any idea they disagree with their call for "safety" has become a tool of emotional and ideological fascism.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“In my own field of education, the glorious tradition of a classical, liberal education, where men pursue truth, has been turned into something akin to the celebration of "fatal superstition" where we choose our values and governing ideologies on any given day in the same manner that "men choose their clothes".”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“[I]n order for the movie [Lord, Save Us from Your Followers] to mock Christian moralists it had to rely on the objective standard of Christian morality to do so.

Think about it. Because Christianity is grounded in an immutable standard of rightness and wrongness--an absolute moral compass, if you will--it has the unique ability to be self-critical and self-correcting and to repent, reform, revive and return to the right standard that Merchant [the film's producer], and others, are bemoaning has been compromised. Without orthodoxy (right ideas) there is no way to criticize others for lacking orthopraxy (right behavior).”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“Today, evangelical Christians, Catholics, and other conservative students are routinely subjected to programs on campuses that amount to little less than overt intolerance and intellectual persecution. For example, recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Dartmouth College, campus activists stole and burned conservative student newspapers without facing any significant penalty from administrators. The idea expressed in these newspapers and by these students were obviously unwelcome by the thieves in question, but they also were, apparently, not deemed worthy of toleration by the schools' presidents, provosts, and deans.

At Purdue, Vanderbilt, and Syracuse, as well as smaller universities like Castleton in Vermont, many Christian campus organizations cannot operate without violating expansive "non-discrimination" policies. Administrators at many colleges now require all student organizations to draft constitutions on the basis of sexual morality. All lifestyles and worldviews are acceptable except those of orthodox Catholics, Evangelicals, and other conservatives who want to live their lives in a manner consistent with the biblical standards of sexual fidelity and the traditional morality prescribed in Scripture. Such missional clarity is simply not tolerable in these bastions of tolerance.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“[T]olerance is not the same as truth and it is not synonymous with love. Frankly, as formulated by the Left on our college campuses across the land, tolerance is not even tolerant but instead, it is a tool of totalitarian intolerance, which denies any diversity of opinion, diversity of thought, or any final standard of truth in order to measure what is tolerable.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“The university was a Christian invention, but over the centuries and especially in the decades of the twentieth century in our own country, it was progressively secularized. The focus in today's academia is not knowledge or character-building or truth, it is "diversity" or "tolerance", but a very select kind, as most universities are resolutely opposed to true diversity of thought, given their speech codes and bans, and are interested in tolerance only insofar as it benefits favored groups.

Preaching tolerance, while at the same time dismissing truth, has led the millennial generation to embrace a moral and intellectual nihilism. If there is no objective truth and only subjective opinion, inevitably one's opinion becomes the summum bonum or highest good and the idea that truth exists and finding it might involve study is lost.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has cited several colleges and universities that now require professors to warn students of potentially "triggering" language or material: Bay Path University, Colby-Sawyer College, North Iowa Area Community College, St. Vincent's College, and Drexel University, to name a few. Schools such as these have policies in place that put the onus of avoiding offense on the professor, assuming every student to be a victim-in-waiting.

But what constitutes an offense has been dumbed down and labeled a microaggression--and what that is, exactly, is anyone's guess. Teaching students to be courteous and respectful is one thing, but that's not what the Left is interested in, as we can see by their own student protesters. "Microaggressions" exceed the boundaries of common sense and are simply an excuse to end debates, punish dissent, and provide another rationale for leftist protests. Some campuses now prohibit expressions such as, "Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough" or "America is the land of opportunity". Once considered bedrocks of American success, both statements are now deemed microaggressions that could offend those who feel they lack opportunity or success. The ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Russell must be purged from the curriculum on some campuses, because they were all white males. Many colleges have even created "Bias Response Teams" to respond to any allegedly offensive speech on campus.”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth

“A professor at the University of Northern Colorado was shut down for asking students to examine varying viewpoints on such controversial issues as transgenderism, gay marriage, abortion, and global warming. After complaints that some students felt uncomfortable, the professor was warned to stay away from discussing alternative views on such topics. One student actually complained that, "students are required to watch the in-class debate and hear both arguments presented".”
― Everett Piper, Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth