EMMITTSBURG, Maryland (LifeSiteNews) – Mount St. Mary’s University has canceled a lecture scheduled to be given by a self-proclaimed pro-abortion witch after students objected to the event.
The university’s Department of Sociology, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, and the group Alpha Kappa Delta, an honor society of sociology, had scheduled a lecture by Dr. Simone Kolysh on her recently published book, Everyday Violence: The Public Harassment of Women and LGBTQ People. The lecture was originally set for Wednesday, April 6.
Kolysh had been invited by associate professor of sociology Dr. Kim Hansen in his role as faculty advisor for Alpha Kappa Delta. The announced lecture, however, drew strong objections from students and faculty when it surfaced that the speaker was an outspoken advocate of abortion, LGBTQ lifestyles, and BDSM, in contradiction with Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life, marriage, and sexuality.
According to the independent, student-led journal, The Brownson Record, in response to students’ objections, Hansen asserted that the topic of Kolysh’s lecture “fits very nicely with our undergraduate mission statement in that it will help our students ‘to understand and to challenge or embrace the cultural forces operating on them.’ … The fact that the speaker privately disagrees with the Catholic Church shouldn’t be disqualifying … Not sure where any ‘controversy or confusion’ would come from.”
On Kolysh’s Twitter account, she identifies as a “non-binary polyamorous dyke (they/them)” and as an “immigrant witch b*tch.” Her page includes the following statements:
I am pro-abortion (not just pro-choice), I’ve helped many people get theirs and will continue to do so if I have to learn how to perform them illegally, my wife had an abortion at 24 (!) weeks of pregnancy because we were in NY in 2018, but what if we were in TX? (9/1/21)
God I hope all my kids are lgbtq. I think the oldest might be straight. *shudders, hopes it’s a phase* (9/24/20)
F*ck your job and its rules, f*ck your parents and culture and religion and literally anything that doesn’t ONLY bring you joy, f*ck ideas around gender and sexuality and sex and anything others tells you about you, f*ck social norms and respectability and mediocrity. [Asterisks inserted for vulgarity]. (3/23/22)
As a homosexual, I use god’s rest day to spread the gay agenda through prayer and meditation. (3/6/22)
You’d think after god created dogs, she’d know making men would be redundant (2/5/21)
Faculty and students at the Mount demanded that Kolysh’s lecture be canceled. Upon learning of the scheduled event, LifeSiteNews reached out to Baltimore’s Archbishop William Lori, who is a member of the university’s Board of Trustees to ask if he was aware of the invitation and the scandal it was causing. No comment was forthcoming prior to time of this publication. The university subsequently canceled the invitation in keeping with its Catholic identity.
This is not the first time that Mount St. Mary’s has invited a lecturer who publicly contradicts Catholic moral teaching. In 2019, the Mount invited the pro-contraception, pro-abortion former politician Mark Shriver to deliver the university’s commencement address.
As LifeSiteNews reported at the time, “the Cardinal Newman Society immediately issued a statement saying it is ‘shocked and dismayed’ that ‘an institution recommended in our Newman Guide for its faithful Catholic identity’ had chosen Shriver, and noted ‘the possibility of scandal.’”
Mount St. Mary’s University is one of the nation’s oldest Catholic institutions of higher education. It shares its campus with Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.