This week Liz and I made our final efforts to recruit information for our project, with the deadline for doing so inevitably nearing as our projects are due next week. Liz scored some answers from Alex Sanchez and posted them on the website. Additionally, Liz and I were impressed with Cathy’s abilities to recruit information on Reverend Morse, and I took her leads and dug a bit further, confirming that Ron Morse’s daughter went to Webster schools and would have been the right age at the time of the challenge. Through Brittany (the daughter) on Facebook, I found Ron’s (Reverend Morse’s) Facebook. While we’re operating under the assumption this is the man who challenged Rainbow Boys, we cannot be certain. Though it was still very interesting to look around his Facebook: lots of preaching on what he thinks God wants in certain situations, a few posts bashing President Obama, and a bizarre amount of Facebook “fortune cookies” for a devout Christian. His Facebook also indicated he worked at the Victory Baptist Church in downtown Rochester after studying at Louisiana Baptist University. The Victory Church’s website is polished and straightforward but surely intense, stating its belief in “The literal existence of Satan, as an evil and powerful adversary, who acts as personal tempter and accuser.” Since Baptists don’t have a hierarchical structure to their denomination, the thoughts of Morse and other leaders of Victory Church are somewhat unfiltered in comparison to other churches. On his Facebook, Morse quipped, “My only problem with Christianity today is Christians. The desire for the church today is to present Jesus as a hip, loving, best-friend -you -could -ever – have, guy who took a bullet for you.” All this interesting information that I think could drive the challenger perspective of our site inspired me to reach out to Ron Morse through a Facebook message and ask him about the challenge to Rainbow Boys. I was careful to slightly alter my pitch from “a project on censorship” to “a project on what the right circumstances are for banning a book from schools.” While both are true, the latter, I hope, will be more appealing to Morse in terms of giving his honest impression of his issues with the book. I sent the message this morning (4/2) around 9am, and fingers crossed for a response. If he doesn’t respond, can we still craft some of our challenger’s perspective based on the strong probability that this man was the challenger, obviously being careful to indicate we are not entirely sure?
Looking forward, we can surely fill in our student perspective for Carly Maldonado, and I still need to look into separating some of the fact from analysis on the Trish Warren page, with the intention of building a seperate reflection page for all of research and interviews. Would such a page be done collectively or offer reflections from each students?