A teacher in Mifflin County, PA has reportedly shown the fear mongering, anti-Muslim propaganda film Obsession, recently distributed to 28 million swing state voters, to her class at Indian Valley High School, warning the students that if Barack Obama is elected, some of what they saw in the film would occur here in the U.S.
I first got wind of this teacher's clearly inappropriate "lesson" about a week and a half ago, when I was asked by a friend who saw one of my blog posts about the film to contact him about an Obsession related incident in his area. After speaking to this friend and getting what details he had, and finding out how he came by this information, I decided to investigate.
My friend couldn't initially recall the name of the teacher in question, and was only able to tell me that it was a female high school history/social studies teacher. But, since there are only two high schools in Mifflin County, and only a handful of female history/social studies teachers, it didn't take long to find a likely suspect. The official school system website of one of the possibilities, Dawn Renninger, was loaded with far right, conservative Christian clues. Once I zeroed in on this particular teacher, I called my friend back, and, upon hearing the name, he told me he was sure that this was the name he had heard in discussions among local residents about the incident.
On Sunday, October 5, I called Mrs. Renninger and asked her flat out if she was the teacher who had showed the film. She would not give me a straight answer, and told me that I would have to speak to the school's principal, Ronald Varner. So, I gave Renninger my name and phone number, which she said she would give to Varner. After several days with no response from either Renninger or Varner, I called the school and asked to speak to Varner. The first time I called, I was told he was gone for the day, so I called back the next day at an earlier time. This time, after explaining to the person who answered the phone why I was calling, I was connected to the school's vice principal, Michael Zinobile. That was on Thursday, October 9.
Zinobile, raising his voice several times during our conversation, repeated two or three times that I "didn't have the facts." In response, I told Zinobile that I was trying to reach Varner to get his side of the story. I gave Zinobile my name and number to give to Varner, who, again, did not contact me.
I also told Zinobile, as I had told Mrs. Renninger, that even without the reported showing of Obsession at the school, I had found enough inappropriate, politically and religiously biased material on this teacher's official school system website to write about her, and that I planned to do so whether or not Varner responded to my attempts to contact him.
One outrageously inappropriate link among the "Resource Links" provided for students on "Mrs. Renninger's Social Studies Page" is a link, under the heading of "Government," to the American Family Association (AFA). Self-described as "America's Largest Pro-Family Action Site," the AFA, originally founded by Don Wildmon in 1977 as the National Federation for Decency, is one of the most radical far right conservative Christian organizations there is. The following are the Mission and Philosophical Statements of this organization that Mrs. Renninger directs her public school students to as a "government" resource.
Mission Statement
The American Family Association exists to motivate and equip citizens to change the culture to reflect Biblical truth.
Philosophical Statement
The American Family Association believes that God has communicated absolute truth to man through the Bible, and that all men everywhere at all times are subject to the authority of God's Word. Therefore, a culture based on Biblical truth best serves the well-being of our country, in accordance with the vision of our founding fathers.
The pro-creationism and anti-gay AFA promotes and sells films such as Ben Stein's "Expelled," and "They're Coming to Your Town," a film about an Arkansas town that didn't realize that homosexuals were taking over the town until it was to late, and "how homosexual activists plan to do the same in other towns." In addition to the materials distributed by the AFA to promote these and other religious right causes, its website promotes the work of Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, devoting a page of its online store to selling Barton's Wallbuilders DVDs. Needless to say, as inappropriate as the rest of the material on the AFA website is for a public school teacher to be promoting, the fact that Mrs. Renninger, as an American history teacher, is endorsing historical revisionism by sending her students to a website that promotes the distortion of and outright lies about American history, in both the website's content and the marketing items such as Barton's "American Heritage Series," makes matters even worse.
The AFA is also a distributor of the extremely biased and dishonest 2008 presidential election "Voter Guide" put out by Wallbuilders. The specific lies and misrepresentations in this Voter Guide, which is still being distributed by churches and religious organizations, and will be until election day, are detailed in a post I wrote on Talk2Action back in August.
Another government resource linked to on Mrs. Renninger's website is the "Government Watch" page of Pennsylvania State Senator John Eichelberger, whose website's prominently placed "Constituent Action" section singles out only one cause with a separate link -- pro-family issues. While it would, at first glance, seem entirely appropriate for a teacher whose courses include a course on government to link to the website of a politician who represents the school's congressional district, Eichelberger, whose pro-life views are clearly in line with those of the AFA and very visible on his website, is the only politician singled out for inclusion in Renninger's list. There are no links to the websites of the district's state representative, or to the websites of its representative or senators in the federal government.
The section of Renninger's "Resource Links" page titled "Current Issues Main Links" does list the typical current events resources recommended by many teachers, such as the BBC, NPR, and PBS, but the only cable news network website included in Renninger's list is FOX News.
Another quite questionable thing on Mrs. Renninger's website is found on her homepage. It's an announcement of the theme for this year's "Veteran's [sic] Day Assembly" at the school, an event that Renninger apparently plans. This year's theme is a quote she attributes to Dick Cheney -- "It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you." Did Mrs. Renninger bother to look up where this quote came from? Or check to see if it was even real? Because it isn't. It's from an emailed letter allegedly written by Cheney, first circulated in 1999, then again shortly after the 2000 election, and eventually presented on right wing websites as a "prophetic" speech given by Cheney on August 19, 2001, just weeks before 9/11. Now, seven years after the first appearance of the bogus email, its last sentence, "It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you," is quoted on countless right wing websites, attributed to Cheney, but with no source. I certainly hope Mrs. Renninger holds her students to a higher standard of scholarship in checking their sources than she herself seems to exhibit.
The only additional information I've been able to find out about the reported showing of Obsession at Indian Valley High School is that at least one student's parents did complain to the principal, who had neither viewed nor approved the film before it was shown. It wasn't until after the complaint that the principal, along with the president of the school board, watched the film, and neither saw a problem with it.
I was also told about another reported incident in which Mrs. Renninger told a class they would receive extra credit if they wore something red, white, and blue on the day of a test. One student who showed up that day wearing a shirt with the Obama logo on it was denied this extra credit, even though the logo is red, white, and blue, and nothing in the school's dress code prohibits the wearing of clothing with political logos. It is not clear whether or not this student was the same student whose parents complained about the showing of Obsession.