UPDATE: It appears that Francisco Nava is behind the threats and inflicted his own injuries. In keeping with my previous policy of condemning false hate crimes, I wholeheartedly condemn his actions.

In light of this development, I believe that Nava needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, as well as having appropriate disciplinary action taken against him by Princeton – which, in my opinion, should be expulsion. That said, the anemic reaction of Princeton University to earlier reports of threats – and to the current ones – is distressing, even if they originated with Nava. Princeton would have no doubt gone into crisis mode, as it did with the gay students noted in the McGinley columns referenced below, had the earlier threats (frauds that they were) been received by an outspoken minority student. If they had done so at that time, Nava's misdeeds would have been uncovered then and the later incidents would not have occurred. My fear is that this point will be missed in all the discussion of this serious series of incidents being fabricated. It should not be.

And before anyone asks, I specifically do not offer an apology to columnist Jason Sheltzer. I believe my assessment of his column, which was shared by numerous letter-writers published by the Daily Princetonian, is accurate. His column was motivated by the very sort of bias and bigotry that he condemned in the Anscombe Society -- and fell well-short of any standard of intellectual rigor.

An interesting situation has come into being at Princeton this week, one which is antithetical to the purpose of a university -- and which shows just how far down the path of fascism one side of the political/social/moral divide has descended.

Some quick background. A group of students organized a group called the Anscombe Society at Princeton University and obtained recognition two years ago. They have held a national conference, helped organize chapters on other campuses, and have recently seen one of their members named a Rhodes Scholar. They are an organization that promotes traditional moral values with regard to sexuality and gender -- positions that were definitely mainstream within my lifetime, and which are still overwhelmingly held by a majority of Americans. they seek to promote their views through debate, discussion and intellectual persuasion. And that is something that is threatening to the Left, and which cannot be allowed to remain unchallenged.

And so Princeton students awoke on Wednesday, December 12, to find the group attacked in in the Daily Princetonian a column by columnist Jason Sheltzer.

The Anscombe Society deserves a closer look, and what one uncovers isn't pretty.



I spent a few hours browsing through the Anscombe Society's website and reading the "Articles of the Week" distributed to their listserv. I found much more than benevolent admonitions to wait until marriage. Instead, the Anscombe Society has taken a strong stance against equal rights for gays and lesbians and is in favor of a return to "traditional gender roles."

In other words, Sheltzer declared the Anscombe Society to be a hate group. Interestingly enough, Sheltzer does not actually take the time to refute any of the positions the group takes or any of the arguments made in articles he quotes (I suspect he lacks the intellectual capacity to do so). Instead, he simply implies that the members of the Anscombe society are not "morally conscious" and that they promote "religious propaganda", and that they preach "wrongheaded notions."

Now perhaps it is purely coincidental, but within hours of the publication of Sheltzer's screed, someone acted upon it, seeking to ensure that such
wrongheaded notions" ceased being preached by those who are not "morally conscious".

Four officers of the Anscombe Society and a prominent conservative politics professor received threatening emails Wednesday evening from off-campus email addresses.

The five individuals received identical messages telling them they would "suffer," ordering them to "shut the fuck up" and declaring that "you are not welcome here." "We will destroy you," the message said.

Though the message did not explicitly mention the Anscombe Society, the four students who received emails were Anscombe vice president Jonathan Hwang '09, president Kevin Staley-Joyce '09, former president Sherif Girgis '08 and administrative committee chair Francisco Nava '09. Politics professor Robert George — who has publicly supported conservative causes, including the Anscombe Society's goal of promoting chastity — also received the message.

"It would be safe to say that the Anscombe Society is a common factor linking all of us," Hwang said. "It is the most intense reaction to the Anscombe Society that I've ever received."

University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said the University is investigating the threat but declined to elaborate because of security concerns. "The normal protocol for these types of threats is for public safety to determine the credibility and proceed to investigate," she said in an email.

Now I won't claim that Sheltzer is in any way morally, legally, or personally responsible for these threats -- though I would be willing to bet that Sheltzer would make precisely such an assertion if a conservative student had written such a piece against a liberal group and it had been followed immediately by death threats against that group's officers and adviser. After all, it would be the clearly foreseeable consequence of such speech, he and his fellow liberals would no doubt argue, claiming that such speech had created a hostile environment for and diminished the safety of the members of whichever protected class the group represented. Such threats would have become the university's top priority -- and "normal protocol" would have been suspended by the University, with the threats being immediately treated as serious and solidarity shown with the threatened group.

That didn't happen.

Indeed, it hadn't happened the last time Anscombe Society members had received such threats.

It is tempting to believe that this is only an isolated incident. It is not. These tactics are part of a pattern designed to silence members of our community who speak out against the hookup culture and sexual liberationist ideology.

Francisco Nava '09 returned to Princeton after the summer break feeling a new sense of intellectual liberation. He had resolved to a kind of political coming-out, deciding that he would, as he told me, "no longer mask my views on contemporary moral issues."

And so he joined the Anscombe Society as an active member. He spoke up in class and precept in order to defend the beliefs that do not just belong to him — they define him and his faith. It was then that he was first faced with personal intimidation here at Princeton University. Anonymously scrawled on a piece of paper and laid hauntingly in his mailbox, Nava found the aggressive message: "YOU HAVE FOUND THE WRONG CAUSE."

Though rendered a little "afraid and paranoid" by the malice behind such a threat, Francisco tried to let it slip from his mind. Mustering the courage to continue to speak out, he published a well-argued opinion piece in these pages entitled "Princeton's Latex Lies." Heralded by some and denounced by others, the article prompted campus-wide discussion of pertinent issues of health and morality.

Two days passed. Returning from Sunday morning church services, Nava discovered a new note written with the same ominous green and black ink as the first. It read, chillingly: "ONE MORE ARTICLE AND YOU WON'T LIVE TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY."

He wrote to me: "For several days I lived in fear of saying, writing or even thinking anything controversial in class or informally among my friends." Nava's foray into intellectual openness came to an abrupt, horrible stop. And only a week later, a third threat with the same message was placed in his mailbox.

On the afternoon of the second threat, Public Safety dutifully arrived on the scene and collected the letter as evidence. Presumably a report was filed and, as Nava, an alternate RCA, informed me, all reports involving students are forwarded to the administration. Herein lies the most disturbing detail: The administration of Princeton University knows that a member of its student body has had his life threatened. And nothing happened.

After nearly a month of waiting, he received a two-line email from Public Safety. But from Butler College, from Nassau Hall, from West College, there was nothing.

As Princetonian columnist Brandon McGinley points out, this stands in stark contrast to how Princeton had responded to another such incident around the same time.

It is instructive here to compare the treatment of Nava, the morally conservative Mormon student, with the administration's swift and forceful reaction to another incident on Princeton's campus.

Returning from Fall Break, some homosexual students found obscenities — apparently phalluses and other images — sketched on the blackboards outside their rooms. Within a few hours, Whitman College had RCAs, counselors and two deans to the scene. The LGBT Center sent out a notice about the event and encouraged students to mount pink triangles in their windows and doors to show solidarity.

On the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 11, Nava sat alone in his room. There were no counselors. There were no deans. There was no University-sponsored center to raise awareness, offer support and encourage solidarity. There was just Francisco.

It seems pretty clear who is valued and protected by the university, isn't it -- and that if you are a conservative student with traditional religious values, you are not valued and will not be protected by the university when your life is threatened. You certainly will not receive the sort of outspoken, public support that gay students will receive when confronted with disgusting images. After all, what is one potentially dead conservative religious student when there are offended homosexuals to be comforted and lifted up? Such a conservative is not the victim of a hate crime (and, unlike the offended gay students, Nava was the victim of a crime) -- and besides, with his positions he deserves to be hated, reviled and harassed, right?

Now this would be a scandalous enough situation if the story ended there. It didn't.

Francisco Nava '09 was physically attacked by two men in Princeton Township Friday evening, sustaining a concussion but no other serious injuries. The assault comes on the heels of several threatening messages recently sent to Nava, apparently in connection with his involvement with the socially conservative Anscombe Society.

Details of the incident have not been confirmed by Princeton Township Police or the University Medical Center at Princeton, but Nava said in an interview Friday evening that he was walking from a borrowed car to the house of a boy he is mentoring when he was stopped by a man dressed in black and wearing a ski cap. According to Nava, the man said that someone was hurt and asked for his help. A second assailant, who was waiting around the corner, grabbed Nava from behind. Together, the two men checked him against a wall and repeatedly hit his head against the bricks.

"Eventually I just blacked out," Nava said in an interview last night. "I don't remember what happened; I just saw a bunch of white." When he came to, he said, the two men were still hitting him.

The two men told Nava to "shut the fuck up" as they left him lying on the ground. Though he was carrying a wallet, credit cards and a cell phone, the assailants did not take any of Nava's belongings.

Indeed, Nava draws the obvious connection between this act of physical violence designed to silence him and the threats that have been coming for months with no significant action by the university.

There have been two very interesting and eloquent posts on The Prox, the blog of the Daily Princetonian. Also interesting is the lack of comment there from columnist Jason Sheltzer. I guess his moral consciousness is out at the dry cleaners or some such thing.

And, for that matter, so was the moral consciousness of the Princeton University community as a whole. The scheduled event expressing solidarity with the conservative victims of these hate crimes did not happen after all. I guess they don't have enough PC points to qualify for support. But it appears that conservative students at Princeton plan on standing firm for their principles.

And somehow, neither the local paper nor the national media can be troubled to report the story. maybe its because Princeton itself refuses to issue an alert to students about the incident or take any serious action in response to the threats or the attack.

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