There has been a fair amount of commentary on the case of Marie Bain, a drama teacher at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California, who was fired by the local bishop after a parent complained that she had once served as a patient escort at a Planned Parenthood clinic at some point in the past, before she had taken the teaching job. Apparently, not only is dissent not tolerated in the Catholic church, but even non-conformist acts committed before the rules in question were applicable constitute retroactive violations.

But it would be too much to imagine that only the teachers - “role models”, of course - are prohibited from acting on their own beliefs. “Naaman the Ex-Leper” quotes an e-mail sent him by a currently-enrolled student at that school, who notes that, by express policy, any student who expresses dissenting opinion on abortion, including abortions that haven’t even happened, will be expelled. From the school rulebook, as quoted by the student:

In our student handbooks, it states in capital letters that, “ANY STUDENT WHO PUBLICIZES OR ADVOCATES AN ABORTION EITHER PLANNED OR ALREADY OBTAINED WILL BE DISMISSED FROM LORETTO.”

Not only can you not truthfully express an opinion about abortion, you can’t even tell the truth about the fact that you or (apparently) someone else has had an abortion. Only silence about inconvenient truths is acceptable, on pain of expulsion. (I find this ironic in light of next week’s planned “National Day of Silence” over abortion - apparently, while other kids are planning to voluntarily remain silent to publicize the repression they have suffered (?) and advocate for repression of others’ rights in redress (?), students at this school are silenced every day by people with the same views as the students who are voluntarily silencing themselves. As I previously noted, irony is not a strong suit of the anti-choice brigade.)

UPDATE: Further information reveals that the student promulgating this policy - in defense of the bishop’s actions - is also the daughter of the woman who investigated the teacher’s past and filed the complaint against her.