Welcome to America - Land of the Free, Home of the Vaginas

ABC NEWS - A New Jersey professor claims he was suspended over an online photo containing a quote from "Game of Thrones" that he says a school official perceived as a threat. Francis Schmidt, who teaches art and animation at Bergen Community College, says he was suspended for eight days after posting a photo in January of his 7-year-old daughter wearing a T-shirt with a quote from the graphic HBO show that read: "I will take what is mine with fire and blood." Schmidt said school officials questioned whether the reference was meant as a threat against a dean, who was one of the people who viewed the post on Schmidt's Google Plus social media feed.

The school has been embroiled in labor negotiations and Schmidt said he wondered if his suspension had to do with him filing a grievance after being denied a sabbatical about two months prior to the incident. Schmidt says he was ordered to consult a psychiatrist as one of the conditions of being reinstated with back pay. School spokesman Larry Hlavenka told The Associated Press on Friday the school had followed its safety protocols in the case, which he called a private personnel matter. "In following its safety and security procedures, the college investigates all situations where a member of its community — students, faculty, staff or local residents — expresses a safety or security concern," Hlavenka said, citing multiple school shootings across the U.S. this year.

Schmidt told The Record ( http://bit.ly/1leamtv ) that school officials told him the quoted phrase triggered thoughts of the possibility of a school shooting when he asked what they found threatening about it. "For God's sake, I'm a middle-aged art professor, I don't own any firearms," Schmidt told the newspaper. The hit television series is based on the books by Bayonne, N.J.-born fantasy writer George R.R. Martin. Schmidt's suspension was first reported Thursday on the Inside Higher Ed website. 

These stories are literally driving me to the brink of insanity. I'm honestly so heated right now that I don't even know what to write. I'm just hovering over my keyboard, shaking. Honestly, who the fuck sits around and thinks of this shit. "Oh my gosh, do you see the shirt that this guy's daughter is wearing in this picture that he posted? Someone should really do something, he's obviously using this t-shirt that someone else is wearing, with an ambiguous quote from a fictional character, in a fictional TV show based on fictional novels, to subliminally threaten the dean of the school he works at by posting this picture on his Google Plus page." If that logic makes any fraction of sense to you, please go to the tallest building you can find and do your best swan dive from the top because that is the only meaningful action you'll ever be able to contribute to the world.

Even if ol' Francis personally slipped a note under the dean's door that said, "I will take what is mine with fire and blood." Can we call that a legitimate threat? The year is 2014, not 1200, nobody fucking talks like that anymore. I guess that is the real problem though, it is 2014, and everybody is so over-sensitive it makes me want to throw up. Now-a-days you've got to walk around on eggshells to make sure no one else's feelings are getting hurt. Everybody gets a trophy. Bossy is a bad word. We don't call kids "champ", because it implies victory over another person. You can't have a football team called the Redskins because a bunch of white people think it's racist. Our country is so ass backwards in logic it astounds me. How long before we're doling out actual jail sentences for insulting someone? Hopefully we get our shit together, but if that day ever comes, you can give me liberty or give me death, because the country that I once loved is gone, and it's now dominated by a bunch of pussies. 

PS - Google Plus? How the fuck did this picture even get discovered?