Originally appeared April 3, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.
The New York Times published a dispiriting little article recently about how college students tend to be "guarded and private about their intellectual beliefs." According to one college dean, "Students are interested in hearing another person's point of view, but not interested in engaging it, in challenging it, or being challenged."
Part of the reason must lie in the way that the humanities and social sciences are frequently taught these days, particularly the deadening influence of doctrines such as deconstruction and multiculturalism.
With deconstruction, the point is not to learn about ideas in order to assess their merits and figure out which ones are better and worse, but only to "deconstruct" them - to see where they come from, how they are used and whose interests they serve.
Similarly, multiculturalism teaches students to see all cultural outlooks as self-contained wholes, presumably internally coherent and largely incommensurable with other views. Thus all views are immune to criticism from other views, and therefore, by default, equally valid.
Both doctrines fall prey to severe criticism and each can easily be turned back upon itself: "Deconstruction" can be deconstructed (as excellently by Prof. Stephen Cox in "Critical Review," Winter 1989); and, "multiculturalism" is, after all, just one viewpoint among many, no more valid than some opposing view.
But students probably do not think their own thoughts out to that "meta-analytical" level and their professors are not likely to teach any analysis that calls their teaching into question.
In any case, both doctrines are profoundly anti-intellectual. Neither provides students with any way to discover or develop reasons why they should accept some views and not accept others. They leave the impression that it is impossible and somehow even wrong to try.
This discourages reasoned discussion: It creates a disincentive for students to express any opinion about whether something is good or bad, true or false, right or wrong, if they have been taught that, in the nature of things, their opinion cannot have any justification.
But this means that anyone influenced by these ideas is left without a way to explain to critics why democracy is good, why a free press is good, why individuality is good, why free-market economy is good or why religious freedom is good.
Thoughtful people, philosophers even, once offered persuasive arguments for each of these ideas, and the force of the arguments actually prevailed since each of these institutions we now enjoy constitutes a major change from earli er authoritarian regimes where they were entirely absent.
Even today we face assault from people, Old Testament-minded "Christian Reconstructionist" at home and Islamic militants abroad, who oppose these institutions, so we had better be prepared to argue for them anew rather than treating those other viewpoints as "interesting" but immune from criticism.
As with many issues in the general culture this has direct relevance for gays and lesbians as we seek acceptance as legal and moral equals. Most obviously, both "Christian Reconstructionists" and Islamic militants want homosexuals to be executed.
But even more, we need to be able to prove the merits of our claims to skeptics, the "undecided," and those who are new to our issues. And we need to be able to reassure ourselves, particularly those many of us still in the closet, that our cause is just.
We must be prepared to offer reasons why homosexuality is good: why being gay is not pathological or a psychological defect; why homosexuality is legitimate no matter whether it is genetic, chosen, or the result of obscure psychological processes; why homosexual sex has value and what it contributes to our well-being.
For instance, one of the prominent claims of the religious right is that the American Psychiatric Association simply yielded to political pressure when it removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973.
But in fact there were a large number of cogent arguments for the change, based on numerous psychological studies and rooted in good psychiatric and psychological principles. We need to be able to reproduce those arguments and show people the religious right is wrong.
What will not work is the kind of response we often hear from gay organizations, that anti-gay claims are "hateful and divisive rhetoric and all fair-minded Americans will reject these hateful and discriminatory words that promote hateful, anti-gay violence," etc., etc. That is just hot air, convincing no one, and implies that we have no good arguments for our side.
Similarly, since our sexual relationships are as valuable in our lives as they are in everyone else's, we must defend our sexual activity as healthy, self-actualizing, fostering relationships, expressing affection, and sometimes just extremely entertaining.
In the face of an artificial distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual activity, we need to develop and promote a public language to help people see why defenses of our "orientation" but not our "activity" simply grant victory to our opponents.
Humans are not pure spirit and celibacy is contrary to human nature. For us to seek acceptance or inclusion based on the idea that sexual activity is separable from our "selves" is deeply demeaning to the bodies that we are. But most of our gay organizations are silent about sexual behavior while our opponents condemn it as their rhetorical trump card.