Douglas County charter school under fire for Holocaust comparisons
Also: local cathedral vandalized, Afghan refugees in Wyoming and a farewell from Liam
The family of two students at American Academy charter school in Castle Pines has filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights alleging that the school has created a hostile environment for Jewish students.
The complaint hinges on a post shared to the Facebook page of Kay Wan, vice president of American Academy’s board of directors. First reported by Kyle Clark, the post compares a woman appearing to show identity papers to Nazi soldiers in the 1940s to current-day pandemic mitigation measures.
“Welcome to the new normal,” the image is captioned. “But is it really new?? Show me your papers!! History repeats itself. This is only the beginning.”
In a copy of the complaint obtained by HFC, the lawyer for the family said that the mother of the two children attempted to contact the Douglas County school board and superintendent about the post and did not receive any response. The mother then contacted the Anti-Defamation League, which reached out to Wan.
“With no action taken by DCSD or American, mother has serious concerns for the safety of her minor children while attending American,” the complaint reads. “Ms. Wan’s offensive and antisemitic posts have created a hostile environment that has deprived Jewish students of their right to equal access to education.”
In an email sent to American Academy parents on Sept. 29, the board of directors defended Wan’s right to express her opinion and denied the assertion that the post was antisemitic.
“As we see it, the post is intended to show the dangers of government overreach and to that extreme, fascism,” it read. “While we do not advocate for or adopt Ms. Wan's comparison between historical fascism and today's events, we also do not read anti-Semitism into her comments. In fact, we read a strong rejection of the kind of government that perpetrated anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”
The email said that as a first-generation Chinese American whose mother fled communism, Wan’s “life experiences lend a perspective many do not have. We all have a right to agree or disagree with her personal view and to voice our opinions accordingly, to hopefully include avoiding the pervasive (and toxic) cancel culture that persists in today’s society.”
An article published last week in Intermountain Jewish News about the situation reported that ADL Mountain States director Scott Levin had attempted to contact Wan and was so far unsuccessful.
The ADL has spoken out on numerous occasions against making Holocaust analogies, including in the ongoing case of a Cherry Creek student, on the grounds that they are inaccurate and disrespectful to its victims.
“While individuals should certainly learn lessons from the Holocaust and seek to ensure that the actions of Nazi Germany are never repeated, we must also take care to avoid directly comparing them to modern-day events, except perhaps in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” Levin told IJN. “Failure to do so not only cheapens the memory of millions killed by the Nazis, it also diminishes society’s ability to effectively address the actual substance of the claimed problem.”
Analogies to antisemitic laws in the Third Reich have become frequent among people protesting vaccine mandates and other public health measures to contain COVID-19, as IJN notes. The most high profile example to-date in Colorado is a comment from Rep. Lauren Boebert, who made international news when she described people conducting vaccination efforts in her district as “needle Nazis.”
A parting reflection
This will be Liam’s last edition of Have Faith, Colorado. Liam will be greatly missed by HFC and the Colorado journalism community, but we wish him well in his new beat as religion reporter at the Tennessean, where he is already doing stellar work. Here are some final thoughts from Liam in his own words:
I’m really enjoying Tennessee so far, but I miss Colorado. The mountains, the people, and yes, even the religion.
Colorado’s religious landscape has a unique flare. University of Denver religious studies professor Carl Raschke told me once, “Historically, Colorado has been a place for religious freedom and religious experimentation.”
Over the past 18 weeks, by working on Have Faith, Colorado, I began to understand what Raschke meant.
A lot is happening within faith communities, but religion is also colliding with other major social issues, such as the voter fraud claim debate, or the push to house more people experiencing homelessness, or Snoop Dogg’s performance at Red Rocks.
If you have spent enough time in Colorado, you know it’s a very special place. Carina and I are of the belief that its religion is as well.
That’s why the two of us did this in the first place. It’s why we spent more hours every week on each edition than we always expected to. It’s why each newsletter was longer than we imagined every week.
Our core drive hasn’t been entrepreneurialism, or a desire to do something that others are not.
Carina and I started Have Faith, Colorado because we care about religion, and we want to inspire the same enthusiasm in others. We hope that maybe, this newsletter has placed the beat on a reporter’s radar or an editor’s list of coverage priorities.
Don’t mistake me. We know that all newsrooms in the Centennial state are strapped for staff. Nor are we saying that most reporters in Colorado don’t care about religion. And in fact, there are some who have modeled this balance of covering religion along with their other beats.
Which leads me to my last point. When I approached Carina with the idea of a weekly newsletter about religion, I was pleasantly surprised at how excited she was from the get-go. It’s not like she has a whole other job covering education in the state’s third most populous city.
And now, she takes the reins of Have Faith, Colorado. Part of me wishes I could keep working on it with her. It has been a lot of fun to collaborate on this and it’s always nice to help when, as Carina said to me once, “Colorado was on fire this week” (not literally, just figuratively with religion news. Specifically, for this week’s edition).
But I’m so eager to see where she takes it and to watch Coloradans journey along with her. I have a good feeling the road ahead for religion and journalism in Colorado is going to be interesting and exciting.
Actually, it’s more than just a feeling. I have faith.
In Brief
Dateline NBC will be airing a two-hour special this evening on Love Has Won, the Crestone-based cult under investigation after its leader’s mummified remains were found by law enforcement this spring. On Twitter, reporters Noelle Phillips and Be Scofield, who have written about Love Has Won for the Denver Post and Guru Magazine, criticized Dateline for describing the special in promotional materials as “a story never told before.” (One promo also implies that the Stupa of Dharmakaya is in southwestern Colorado — it’s in Northern Colorado, 300 miles away from Crestone. A local reporter would know that!)
Colorado native Mike Proud was named as the next executive director of the Colorado Baptist Convention at its annual meeting this week. According to an article in the Baptist Press, Proud grew up in Lafayette and has served as director of missions for the Orange County Southern Baptist Association for the past 10 years. At the meeting, Pastor Mark Spence of Mississippi Avenue Baptist Church in Aurora was elected president of Colorado Baptists. Spence is one of the 21 Baptist pastors in Colorado who signed a joint statement expressing displeasure with the SBC’s handling of the third-party investigation into sexual abuse allegations (more details in last week’s newsletter.)
The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Denver was vandalized over the weekend. According to the Denver Channel “messages of hate — including the terms ‘child rapists,’ a homophobic slur, and references to Satan — were spray-painted on the church's walls and doors sometime before the beginning of its 8:30 a.m. Mass.” This is the third time the cathedral has been vandalized since July, rector Father Samuel Morehead told the channel. Denverite reported that community members rallied to clean up the graffiti (which the site said also included swastikas) and that other faith groups, including the nearby Episcopal cathedral, reached out to the basilica to offer support.
The Centennial Institute will host Jack Posobeic for a discussion of his new book about Antifa on Oct. 18. Posobeic was one of the main promoters of the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory and has been linked to white nationalist figures by the SPLC’s Hatewatch.
The Washington Post published a fascinating article about efforts in our neighboring state Wyoming to welcome Afghan refugees for the first time. Wyoming, where 84% of residents are white and just 3.4% are foreign-born, is the only state in the nation that has never had a formal refugee resettlement program. Despite that, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Casper is taking steps to host an Afghan refugee family, and has been attracting some community support. Mohamed Salih, a Sudan-born longtime Cheyenne resident who recently moved to Denver, told the Post that historically, Wyoming’s culture has not been welcoming to foreigners. “I had friends, but in total, the community is really not welcoming to the other. And that is, I think, wedded in their conservative beliefs: We want to keep Wyoming as Wyoming — whatever that means.”
The Interfaith Alliance of Colorado is a 2021 Ally Award recipient from ONE Colorado, the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization. “They seek to be a force for good in Colorado by standing up for rights and equality for all people,” ONE Colorado said of the Alliance in an email. “The Interfaith Alliance has continued to be the faith voice standing up for LGBTQ equality and women’s reproductive rights and justice.”
In an article in the Colorado Episcopalian, Rev. Jan Pearson announced that after 21 years, the 32nd Avenue Jubilee Center decided “with sadness and grief” to close its doors at the end of the year, citing demographic changes in the neighborhood it serves. “In Northwest Denver, where the 32nd Avenue Jubilee Center is, those who have still managed to arrive at our doors seeking overnight shelter or food, face the suspicion of our new neighbors. Our neighborhood, for the most part, is no longer welcoming to those in need.”
A sermon Colorado icon Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber preached through Facebook to the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility got a shout-out in a New Yorker article about a July report from the Pew Research Center looking into what U.S. pastors preached about in the run-up to the 2020 election. The report sadly does not aggregate data by state, but includes interesting information about the ways different Christian groups spoke about politics, COVID-19 and race from the pulpit.
And one note of housekeeping: this newsletter will continue in its same format for the foreseeable future, but if any of our readers are interested in contributing to Have Faith, Colorado in any capacity, please reach out! Does not need to be a major commitment — we’re open to having guest editors, collaborations with other local reporters/writers, Q&As with people doing interesting things in the local faith community and anything else that could help us provide information in valuable and creative ways.
“Have Faith, Colorado” is a weekly roundup and analysis of local religion articles in the Centennial State. It’s by Liam Adams and Carina Julig. Carina covers education and other Aurora news at the Sentinel Colorado. Liam has worked as a local journalist in Colorado and a freelancer covering religion. He recently started as the religion reporter at The Tennessean. To connect with us about the newsletter please email liamadams.journalism@gmail.com and carina.julig@colorado.edu, and follow us on twitter at @liamsadams and @CarinaJulig.