Students For Life Imperiously Demeans Heritage Academy

NOTE - Update at bottom
A lot of Christian sites are atwitter with a situation that has originated at Heritage Academy, a private Christian school in Hagerstown, MD, an hour's drive away from my home.  I learned of this primarily through news feeds from Students for Life.  They have posted an account of it on their site.  To their credit, they seem to have stated all the facts, although their disdain for the school is evident.

This is what I gather.  Heritage Academy is a private K-12 Christian school.  Its students sign a pledge (perhaps when they are old enough to understand it) promising to abide by Christian values; among other things, they promise not to engage in premarital sex, do drugs, drink alcohol.  A graduating senior named Maddi Runkles violated the pledge and became pregnant as a result.  It appears that the boy with whom she fornicated is not a student of the Academy.  Prior to that she occupied leadership positions in the Key Club and Student Council.  She was removed from those positions and will not be allowed to participate in commencement ceremonies.  She will receive her diploma.

Her father was president of the school board.  He resigned in protest over the disciplining of his daughter.  The Runkle family made contact with Students for Life through another agency and the result is the campaign that you see on the SFL site as they try to gin their followers into browbeating the Heritage Academy to do their bidding.

Maddi did toy with the idea of abortion.  To her immense credit she did not go that route and will give birth to her baby.  No one would think of condemning her.  What I must denounce, however, is the de facto demonization of the Heritage Academy administrators.  The SFL post is full of pejorative language aimed at the school, as are many of the comments on SFL's facebook page.  I will now unpack some of it, bit by bit, in "bullet" style.

• The very title "you won't believe what her Christian school did" is designed to introduce the initial bias against the school.  This is a clear case of none-too-subtle peer pressure.
• "what they did to Maddi for her mistake was unnecessarily cruel and set a bad example of what it means to be a pro-life Christian"  Dear SFL, with all due respect, you've no basis for sitting in judgment over the decisions of this school.
• "Punishment without Compassion"  Who is defining the language here?
• "Doesn’t that break your heart?"  And it better break your heart, or else you are judgmental and lack compassion.  Notice the manipulation?

Kristin Hawkins said she tried to convince the principal to see things her way, but he didn't bite the bait.  Did it not occur to her that he isn't answerable to her for his decisions?  Perhaps there are facts and other considerations that the principal won't divulge, simply because they are none of our damned business.  For that reason alone, SFL does not know what is the correct course of action in this matter; nor do I.  I, however, do not pretend to know it, let alone presume to urge others to strong-arm Heritage Academy to following any arbitrary dictates.

Too many commenters (and other bloggers) are following SFL's leads, allowing themselves to be swayed by the emotions ginned up by SFL's irresponsible post.  Some of the ridiculous comments include:

• "punished for choosing life"
• "the administrators should be ashamed of themselves"
• "the school is not showing Christ's love"

Now precisely who are being the judgmental and condemning ones?  One comment said the school should "remove the plank from their own eye".  I might suggest that SFL and some of these commenters follow that excellent advice.

UPDATE - Something just dawned on me.  The SFL post mentions that New York Times did a write-up.  Indeed they have.  Bear in mind that on the national scale, Heritage Academy is a relatively small school, not one to be easily noticed.  So how did the NYT come to hear of this in order to do a piece?  Who told them?  Why?  Something about this whole situation does not pass the "smell test".