Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City has fired a math teacher because of her conservative Facebook posts. Beth Reams, who taught at the school for 25 years, said her liberal colleagues who opt to publish their progressive views on Facebook have faced no such scrutiny.
Following the 2016 election, her conservative club students began complaining that teachers were injecting their liberal worldview into everyday conversations, she told “The Daily Wire.” One student claimed that a teacher began the school year by stating that President Donald Trump is a coward. Another alleged that the teacher congratulated 18-year-olds for voting Trump out of office after the 2020 election.
In August 2020, as Pembroke Hill remained on summer break, Reams posted, “the horrific truth is … if people were told to get into boxcars to be taken to ‘virus protection camps,’ many of them would rush to get in line.” Pembroke alumni charged that her post had anti-Semitic undertones. Reams said she meant the post differently.
“I posted this because blindly following government mandates is what the Nazis did,” she said. “I then was told it was read as the opposite, me saying the Jews followed blindly to their deaths. No thought of that ever entered my head, ever.”
Reams opted to remove the Facebook post to avoid misinterpretations, although not before her former student could screenshot it and distribute it. Pembroke Hill’s principal and the head of human resources requested a Zoom meeting with Reams in August 2020 to discuss the nature of her Facebook post.
During the virtual meeting, Reams pointed out that the meeting was inherently political, because other teachers had posted on Facebook about their political views and were not reprimanded for it. She pointed out that there were no consequences for a teacher who compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, or a teacher who wore a Jacob Blake shirt with fake bullet holes.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has denounced ads that compared President Trump to Adolf Hitler, saying that “comparing the president of the United States to Hitler is beneath contempt.”
The school has taken no actions against teachers who used the Hitler-Trump comparisons.
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
