5 Wheaton College football players face felony charges in hazing incident - Chicago Tribune

To borrow from Hemant Mehta, ",,, the school knows how to act quickly when there’s a 'problem.'"

Five Wheaton College football players face felony charges after being accused of a 2016 hazing incident in which a freshman teammate was restrained with duct tape, beaten and left half-naked with two torn shoulders on a baseball field.

A DuPage County judge signed arrest warrants and set $50,000 bonds against the players — James Cooksey, Kyler Kregel, Benjamin Pettway, Noah Spielman and Samuel TeBos — late Monday afternoon. Prosecutors charged the athletes with aggravated battery, mob action and unlawful restraint.

They are expected to turn themselves in to authorities this week.

Three of the accused played in Wheaton College's victory over Carthage College Saturday, and all were listed on the team roster as of Monday afternoon. The Division III program is ranked fourth in the country.

5 Wheaton College football players face felony charges in hazing incident - Chicago Tribune

ADDENDUM::RADIO – THE RICK SMITH SHOW – Rick Smith w/ Chris Rodda | Military Religious Freedom Foundation - Protecting the Constitutional Guarantee of Separation of Church and State in the United States Military

Chris Rodda, Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation talks about her Huffington Post article on religion and the ROTC at Wheaton College as well as the influence of the Reich Dominionists, Quiverfull and Shepherding and how it fits together.

RADIO – THE RICK SMITH SHOW – Rick Smith w/ Chris Rodda | Military Religious Freedom Foundation - Protecting the Constitutional Guarantee of Separation of Church and State in the United States Military

See also:

Bonnie Weinstein's book mentioned by Chris,,,

Wanted: ROTC Military Science Professor (No Non-Christians Need Apply) | Chris Rodda

"There's Army ROTC. Then There's Wheaton Army ROTC." That's the slogan used by Wheaton College, a well-known Christian college in Illinois, to promote its Army ROTC program. It turns out that the slogan couldn't be more true. Wheaton Army ROTC certainly is different -- in an egregiously unconstitutional way. As Army lieutenant and Wheaton graduate James Greene comes right out and says in a recruiting video shown at the school's freshman orientation: "Wheaton College ROTC is unique in that it is the only Christian run ROTC program in the entire nation." (See video below)

Before getting into just how blatantly Christian and incredibly unconstitutional this "Christian run ROTC program" is, I need to back up for a minute and explain why I was looking at Wheaton's ROTC program in the first place.

[,,,]
Yes, the U.S. Army apparently allows Wheaton College to custom order Christian officers to teach in its ROTC program, not just by secretly excluding non-Christian officers from assignments at this school, but by very openly and unabashedly specifying Christian faith as a requirement on the official list of available assignments. What part of the Constitution's "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States" does the Army not understand?

[,,,]
According to MRFF founder and president Mikey Weinstein:

"Wheaton College and its ROTC program seem to earnestly believe that the acronym "ROTC" stands for "Religious Officer Training for Christ." Wheaton and its fundamentalist Christian ROTC unit are to the United States Constitution what a dog with a full bladder is to a curbside fire hydrant. In MRFF's nearly 10 years of fighting this precise, illicit version of Christian extremism in the U.S. military, this Wheaton College/ROTC travesty is one of the most disgustingly blatant, appallingly bold, and mercilessly atrocious attacks on the foundational principles of our U.S. Constitution that we have EVER witnessed!"

A point that Chris clarifies in comments:

,,,An ROTC professor is not "hired" by the college. An ROTC professor is an active duty military officer, and their assignment as an ROTC professor is a military assignment, just like an assignment as an instructor at one of the U.S. military service academies. This means that the college can't require a religious test for an ROTC professor like it does for its own faculty. And since there's not supposed to be any religious instruction in the Army's ROTC courses, whether at a religious college or a non-religious college, it shouldn't make any difference what religion the ROTC professors are unless the religious college is violating other regulations by integrating religious instruction and activities into its ROTC program, as Wheaton obviously is.

Wanted: ROTC Military Science Professor (No Non-Christians Need Apply) | Chris Rodda

Administration offers new tweak to birth control rule - The Washington Post

So just how asinine are the objections to the ACA becoming,,,

First we had Little Sisters of the Poor v. Sebelius who claimed that being required to fill out a short form violates their religious liberty. The court ruled, "[t]o meet the condition for injunction pending appeal, applicants need not use the form prescribed by the Government and need not send copies to third-party administrators."

Next was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling which not only dismantled United States v. Lee (1982) - an employer cannot impose their religious beliefs on their employees - but added confusion by stating,

In fact, HHS has already devised and implemented a system that seeks to respect the religious liberty of religious nonprofit corporations while ensuring that the employees of these entities have precisely the same access to all FDA-approved contraceptives as employees of companies whose owners have no religious objections to providing such coverage,,, Although HHS has made this system available to religious nonprofits that have religious objections to the contraceptive mandate, HHS has provided no reason why the same system cannot be made available when the owners of for-profit corporations have similar religious objections. We therefore conclude that this system constitutes an alternative that achieves all of the Government's aims,,,

In short, fill out a form, you know the one they told the Little Sister they didn't have to use. Yea, OK, that will work,,,for 5 days.

The kicker in all this, Wheaton College v. Burwell where the Court once again reversed course and granted a temporary exemption from the requirement that they fill out the form. [As an aside: Wheaton basically argued, as did the Little Sisters, that filling out the form itself is a violation of their religious liberty. But as some have pointed out Wheaton objects to the "work-around" itself as their health plan would still be required to provide contraceptive coverage and it doesn't want that to happen even though it doesn't have to pay for it.]

That brings us to where we stand today,,,

The new federal guidelines address a set of ongoing legal challenges to the contraceptive requirement raised by dozens of religious nonprofit groups, such as hospitals and charities, that could again put the contraception mandate before the Supreme Court. The religious nonprofits are challenging the administration's already existing opt-out, in which the groups can ask a third party to provide the contraception coverage to their employees. However, the nonprofits say that filling out the form notifying the third party violates their religious beliefs.

The nonprofits can now directly inform the Department of Health and Human Services of their religious objections. HHS and the Labor Department will then coordinate contraception coverage with insurers and third party administrators. The nonprofits still have the option to notify a third party directly.

Which boils down to this, Hobby Lobby is appeased as is Wheaton College.  BUT,,,

Several of the country’s biggest faith groups on Friday said the revised rule was still problematic because it didn’t fully exempt organizations – for-profit or non-profit – with religious objections.

"Here we go again,” said Russell Moore, president of the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination. “What we see here is another revised attempt to settle issues of religious conscience with accounting maneuvers. This new policy doesn't get at the primary problem.”-

Now the religionist want to move the goalpost yet again by claiming that they cannot take ANY action that will set in motion a chain of events that leads to someone receiving contraception, as doing so would make them complicit in the act of providing birth control.

Sorry to say but this debacle is no longer about the ACA or the birth control mandate. It goes much deeper and many fail to see where this is leading:

If you can be exempt from an insurance law that is supposed to bring medical care to everyone, why not just ask to be exempt (as some of these groups have) from pay equity statutes, from civil rights laws (effecting lesbian and gay Americans)? There is no stopping this once you go down this slope of exemptions based on religious claims for FOR PROFIT COMPANIES.

Administration offers new tweak to birth control rule - The Washington Post

New Documentary Tackles Being LGBTQ at Wheaton College | The Bilerico Project

I find this interesting as Wheaton was one of my original college choices back in the day. It is considered a "sister" institution of where I eventually ended up. Although I applaud the efforts of the documentarians, it is sad to see that Wheaton has not progressed much in the last 20+ years; not that the college I went to has either.
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One thing that both the right and left tend to agree on is that higher education is vastly more accepting of LGBTQ people than mainstream society overall. We tell young people all the time that their lives will "get better" once they leave for college, where they can start exploring and expressing themselves freely.

There's a reason for the dual narratives that alternately delight the left and terrify the right. Whether we're talking about the LGBTQ youth who goes to college and finds themselves, or the intolerant youth who upon getting to college is exposed to positive interactions/portrayals of LGBTQ people for the first time and ends up becoming an ally, for a huge number of people, one or the other of those two scenarios is exactly what happens.

But for students at conservative and religious colleges, the story is often very different.

[,,,]
,,, We wanted to create something that would bring this discussion at Wheaton College and other conservative Christian institutions away from political and theological debate and bring it to people, their lives and their voices and their stories. This is of course what this 'issue' is all about.

"Usually the only thing that causes an evangelical Christian to re-examine their beliefs is personal experience -- a friend coming out to them or something similar. We wanted to create that for Wheaton College as a whole. Luke and I both hope this can make some sort of small impact. All we want is for love to win.




New Documentary Tackles Being LGBTQ at Wheaton College | The Bilerico Project