Concord-Carlisle High School
Teacher Harasses Republican Students  
Violated Federal Law, 20 U.S.C. §1232h

By Amy Contrada
December 5, 2000

A U.S. history teacher at Concord-Carlisle High School, Joseph Zellner, harassed Republican students in class last week in violation of federal law, 20 U.S.C. §1232h.

He orally surveyed the students about their political party affiliation; and then, to those not in agreement with his politics, he distributed a paper with ten inflammatory points arguing that this country is no different than the third world.

A parent has complained in writing to the principal. She said that if the charges are correct, the teacher should “be severely reprimanded and removed from his position of trust” at the high school. She said that his action “mocks Concord’s dedication to ‘tolerance.’”

Neither the principal nor the teacher has returned a call from Massachusetts News.

The federal law says, “No student shall be required, as part of any applicable program, to submit to a survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning … political affiliations …” In addition, parents have the right to inspect “all instructional materials … or other supplementary material which will be used in connection with any survey, analysis, or evaluation…”

Since not all students in the class were given this handout, those who received it were clearly singled out by the teacher for humiliation. How many parents even knew this was a topic for discussion that day?

In his class of about twenty students, Zellner asked which of them were Republicans. About five students held up their hands. One student asked him why he was seeking such personal information. The questioning student and other self-identified Republicans were then singled out by Zellner to receive a handout entitled, “For Your Consideration: An interesting alternative perspective on the U.S. presidential election.”

The handout says that, “A Zimbabwe politician has been quoted as saying that children should study this year’s U.S. presidential election closely, because it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena.” It then states that the students should consider our election “from a slightly different perspective” with the following ten statements.

1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).

2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's past.

3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother.

4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

5. Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.

6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.

7. Imagine that sex million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 300 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.

8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.

9.  Imagine that the self-declared winner was himself the governor of a major province, which had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and which actually led the nation in executions.

10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.

Black Doctor Repulsed by Message

After John Diggs, a black medical doctor in South Hadley received the above message, which apparently originated at Yale, as an email sent to a list of black people, he wrote the following:

As long as black folks fail to think independently, they will be slaves. So far, in droves, black folks did what they were told -- vote for Gore. It is not that voting for Gore in and of itself is slavish, it is that the reasons most African Americans gave for doing so were the very same reasons advertised by the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Weak. Bigger problem is that it is getting worse -- blacks supported Gore in higher percentages than they supported Clinton! What have Dems done for black folks besides make them dependent? There are fewer intact black families since Uncle Sam has replaced 'Daddy' in so many homes. Fewer than 20% of black children were born out-of-wedlock in 1960. That number is now greater than 65%!!!

What is most pathetic of all is the fact that so many of the recipients have "Dr." as a title and apparently think this article is clever and insightful rather than error-laden drivel. Doesn't say much for the analytical ability of Yale students either.

Yeah, Uncle Sam. That's my baby's daddy. Thank you DNC.

Finally, 2 Chronicles 7:14 about says it all.

(By the way, Gore did say that he would have a litmus test for the Supreme Court -- support the 'right to choose.' He never finished the sentence. He meant 'choose death for their unborn children.' The right to live, curtailed without trial and without guilt, is the most heinous human rights abuse. I am also convinced that black women have more frequent and more severe and earlier breast cancer because they have more frequent abortions. Twelve percent of the female population has 35% of the abortions.)