<p>Some of the last few posts remind me why the Right is so hard to love.</p>
<p>afadad – after acknowledging that “we don’t know the entire story” – concludes “teachers like this need to be thrown out.” Rush to judgment much? When the Duke lacrosse team incident happened, people rightly slammed the administration and press for lynching the students before listening to their side of the story, and there was a lot more basis for condemning them than there is for going after the teacher here. (I suspect dmd77 is right, but he’s speculating, too.) If one is going to criticize others for rushing to judgment, that ought not to apply only when one doesn’t like the way the hasty judgment is going.</p>
<p>(Also, I note that there were law enforcement professionals involved here. Since when do we presume that the police – even the campus police – are willing tools to enforce academic political preferences? Might it be possible that the police looked at all the facts at their disposal and concluded there was reasonable cause to do further investigation? Should we not give them the benefit of the doubt on that?)</p>
<p>And geeps20 is eloquent about how courageous it is for students to express thoroughly mainstream views. Spare me. I believe strongly in students’ right to express whatever views they want, including views that completely accord with the views of their parents, their friends, and the politically powerful. But I don’t call it “courageous”.</p>
<p>For centuries, through and including today in most parts of this country, people who defended homosexual rights exposed themselves to censure, social isolation, imprisonment, and often serious physical danger. People who condemned homosexuals could generally count – and in most places still can generally count – on the agreement and support of the majority. So maybe there are a few corners of the world where they risk having peers and teachers think less of them for it. Boo-hoo-hoo. I’m not ready to admire their courage.</p>
<p>When my kids were in middle school – at a very politically liberal school – there was an incident of this. One boy, who happened to be very charismatic and popular, from a family of strong evangelical Christians, decided that it was his duty to bear witness against the sin of homosexuality. He thought carefully about what he was going to say, and even wrote it down. As part of it, he called out publically several classmates who had gay parents, and one who was in the process of coming out, and explained how they were immersed in sin and evil. Of course, within minutes there were several sobbing, hysterical 14-year-olds, two of whom had to be taken out of school that day.</p>
<p>Now, there WAS an element of courage in what that boy did – he knew perfectly well that he was expressing a view that the powers-that-be in his school did not agree with. But the social context of that particular issue meant that even 1-against-100 was not such an unequal fight, because the kids he was attacking knew that everywhere BUT their school and their homes their position was extremely precarious. One student breaching the school’s unspoken compact to help those kids feel safe at school was plenty enough to remind his targets that they WERE, after all, targets almost everywhere they went.</p>
<p>(How did this ultra-lefty school respond? Several sessions with the boy and his parents, at which the school made clear that he was free to hold and to express whatever views he wanted, but not to attack his classmates, and that they would not be permitted to attack him. He had not understood at all how hurtful he was being – (a) he was 14, and (b) he came from a social world in which the rhetoric he used was normative and upset no one. His parents had always understood that the moral philosophy of the school was not the same as theirs. While they were proud that he had maintained his faith against social pressure, they also understood that it wasn’t OK to reduce classmates to tears. Things worked out fine. He was a great kid.)</p>