Author Archives: Stephen Henry Miller

Intolerance of Intolerance, or Academic Censorship?

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Should a tenured professor be fired for online criticism of a graduate student instructor who allegedly told a student not to oppose same-sex marriage in her class? The story from Inside Higher Ed:

In November, [John] McAdams, an associate professor of political science [at Marquette University], wrote a blog post accusing a teaching assistant in philosophy of shutting down a classroom conversation on gay marriage based on her own political beliefs. His account was based on a recording secretly made by a disgruntled student who wished that the instructor, Cheryl Abbate, had spent more time in class one day on the topic of gay marriage, which the student opposed. McAdams said Abbate, in not allowing a prolonged conversation about gay marriage, was “using a tactic typical among liberals,” in which opinions they disagree with “are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

Abbate said McAdams had distorted her actions—and that she wasn’t trying to shut down an argument she disagreed with, but simply had wanted to keep a focus on an in-class conversation about the philosopher John Rawls’s equal liberty principle. But conservative blogs spread McAdams’ take on the situation— and she found herself receiving a flood of hateful email messages, some of them threatening.

And from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education):

Marquette is taking action against McAdams, a political conservative and frequent critic of the administration, supposedly in response to his online criticism of a graduate student instructor who told a student not to oppose same-sex marriage in her class. Marquette had previously suspended McAdams without due process, treated him as though he presented a violent threat, and cancelled his current semester’s classes. …

“If Marquette can fire a tenured professor for criticizing a fellow teacher on a blog, then tenure at Marquette is worthless, as are freedom of speech and academic freedom,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “While this is more than likely just an excuse to get rid of McAdams, the fact that McAdams’s supposed offense was criticizing a teacher for squelching dissenting opinions in class only makes Marquette’s utter contempt for dissenters more obvious.

It’s hard to say what the truth of the matter is, but this is bad optics even if McAdams over-reached. Some instructors do, sometimes, stifle/shame students for expressing political opinions that they disagree with, and it’s legitimate to call them out on it. And if that’s not what happened in Abbate’s classroom, then she certainly can respond. So the firing of McAdams sounds like politically correct intolerance by those who like to present themselves as defenders of tolerance (just not of views they happen to know are incorrect).

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From the ‘Unintended Consequences’ File

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I recently read a snarky column in the conservative Washington Times taking issue with housing being developed for LGBT seniors. But this point struck me as of interest:

In 2013, a federal housing study found that when heterosexual married couples look for a place to live, they are slightly more likely to get a favorable response than gay couples. HUD said that while the gap isn’t huge, it did find more discrimination in states that had laws on anti-gay discrimination than those that didn’t. The five-month national study covered 50 metropolitan markets and took place in 2011.

Could that be right? I googled and came across a June 2013 Huffington Post story that reported:

One of the most interesting findings of the new HUD survey is that discrimination was actually slightly higher against same-sex couples in states with protections for LGBT individuals.

“Several factors could account for this unexpected finding, including potentially low levels of enforcement, housing provider unfamiliarity with state-level protections, or the possibility that protections exist in states with the greatest need for them,” HUD concluded.

Since it’s the liberal jurisdictions that have passed LGBT-inclusive housing measures, it doesn’t really seem likely that “protections exist in states with the greatest need for them,” does it. What is more probable is that once these nondiscrimination statutes are passed, landlords are less likely to rent to same-sex couples because it becomes that much harder to evict them for legitimate reasons if the tenants can claim unlawful discrimination.

Something similar has become evident with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of what used to be called disabilities. Once protected-status individuals are hired, it increases the employer’s liability in the event that they are let go. Which could be why, as pointed out by Walter Olson, labor force participation for the disabled actually declined after the ADA’s passage.

Beware those unintended consequences of well-intentioned legislation.

Another example: Labor advocates push for raising the minimum wage to help low-wage earners, who then have their hours cut or find themselves unemployed because, it turns out, businesses actually don’t operate with excess profit margins that can be redirected, by government decree, to salary budgets. Seattle is just the latest demonstration of this unintended (but actually quite well-documented) consequence.

More. The proposed federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is focused on employment discrimination, not housing or public accommodations (while some activists are now advocating that its scope be expanded to include these areas). But the principle of unintended consequences remains very real, which is one reason I remain equivocal about it. The belief that absent a compelling reason for it, businesses are best left to hire, fire and promote as they see fit, is another. And LGBT advocates have failed to produce convincing evidence of systemic employment discrimination.

As for the comparison with race- and gender-based civil rights measures, enforcement of these typically falls back on disparate impact analysis, meaning employers who don’t employee women and racial minorities based on their representation in the population (or at least their representation among qualified job applicants) can be sued by either the EEOC or those who believe they suffered discrimination by not being hired (or promoted). Since there is no convincing count of LGBT people in the population, no one is seriously proposing that LGBT disparate impact be written in to anti-discrimination legislation.

Furthermore. Walter Olson also took note of the housing discrimination finding.

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Contretemps on the Left

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I almost feel sorry for the Human Rights Campaign. I think they long-ago sacrificed their integrity by becoming an outreach arm of the Democratic party. But the LGBT left is incensed that HRC is not working explicitly for the progressive statist/absolutist agenda. Some days you just can’t win.

More. The protesters are charging, for instance, that HRC fails to include “economic justice” concerns in its Corporate Equality Index, thus “pinkwashing” the grievances they have against corporate America.

Furthermore. LGBTQ Task Force leader Rea Carey said, in her annual State of the Movement speech, that LGBT activism has a “moral obligation” to expand its efforts on behalf of the “greater good,” and “to use our progress and any relative privilege we might have to…do our part for a changed and just society.” By which she means bigger, more coercive and confiscatory government. And no exemptions for religious organizations from the dictates of the state. No thanks, Rea.

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A ‘Lifestyle Choice’ Brouhaha

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At first this seemed too silly to bother with, but it’s getting attention from both LGBT and religious right media, so it warrants some acknowledgment.

In an interview with YouTube personality (if that’s the right word) GloZell Green (pictured here), Obama said he hopes the Supreme Court makes the “right decision” on marriage rights for same-sex couples, adding: “I think people know that treating folks unfairly—even if you disagree with their lifestyle choice, the fact of the matter is they’re not bothering you.”

As reported by the Washington Blade:

President Obama deviated this week from the language considered acceptable for talking about gay people when he described the lives of same-sex couples as a “lifestyle choice”—but virtually no one cares.

The Washington Blade reached out to various LGBT groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, the National LGBTQ Task Force and GLAAD, to ask whether they objected to Obama’s use of the phrase. None of those groups responded to a request to comment on that language, which is widely considered unacceptable and offensive because it suggests that sexual orientation is a choice.

Well, apparently the religious right cares. The religious conservative website WND reported (if that’s the right word):

His answer, which seemed to undermine the foundation for claims across America that homosexuals are a class of people with defined characteristics and deserve minority protections, came recently during a recorded interview with GloZell Green, a green-lipstick-wearing, milk and cereal bath-taking YouTube personality who was picked by the White House to visit with the president after his recent 2015 State of the Union address. She begins her videos asking, “Hello this is Glozell! Is you OK? Is you? Good, ’cause I wanted to know!’”

As to treating people fairly because “even if you disagree with their lifestyle choices, the fact of the matter is they’re not bothering you,” one commenter on the WND site wondered if Obama was “finally telling the homosexual lobby to stop suing Christians?”

A few days later, the Blade reported that the White House responds to Obama ‘lifestyle choice’ remark. But it was actually a nonresponse:

In a news conference that marked the first time an openly gay person conducted an on-camera White House news conference, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz addressed questions Wednesday over President Obama’s remark that being gay is a “lifestyle choice.” In response to a question…on whether Obama regrets using the phrase, which he used in a YouTube interview with GloZell Green last week, Schultz replied he hasn’t talked to Obama about the matter.

So, a linguistic tempest in a teabag? Obama probably was revealing, off the cuff, his personal view, and it doesn’t help. That’s what happens when he doesn’t have a teleprompter. But it essentially is inconsequential. The only point worth remarking on is how even inconsequential minutia becomes fodder for media buzz these days.

On the other hand, if a prominent GOP politician made such a remark, there would have been a firestorm of criticism, while the Blade couldn’t get any of the big LGBT activist organizations to call Obama out on this.

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It’s Not Propaganda If Liberals Support It

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Below is the kind of government action that causes left-liberals to roll their eyes over the thought that anyone but abject bigots should object to it, and causes libertarians to roll their eyes because liberals think this is just a dandy use of taxpayer money.

At issue: The National Endowment for the Arts awarded a $10,000 taxpayer-funded grant to a theater company in San Francisco to produce and tour a collection of plays advocating same-sex marriage called “Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays.”

As reported by the Washington Times:

The project was touted by Variety as “a celebration of gay marriage” … But taxpayer advocates say the government shouldn’t be using tax dollars to promote the arts, especially when the art in question has a political agenda that not all taxpayers support.

“This isn’t a pro-gay-marriage or an anti-gay-marriage issue. It’s an issue about how tax dollars are spent. It’s inappropriate and irresponsible for the government to make taxpayers subsidize art in general, and doubly offensive for the taxpayers forced to pay to promote something they might oppose. It would be just as offensive if tax dollars went to fund a play that opposed gay marriage,” said David Williams, president of Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

Leaving aside the larger issues of our federal government distributing taxpayer money to local arts projects that government appointees deem worthy, this is the sort of thing that almost seems intended to provoke a conservative backlash—live and let live, equal rights under the law, it is not.

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More on the Mormon Offer

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David Link recently posted a thoughtful response to The Mormon Bargain, regarding the LDS leadership’s offer to support anti-discrimination legislation that protects LGBT people against housing and employment discrimination, as long as it includes religious liberty protection. Now, Jonathan Rauch has weighed in, and his op-ed in the New York Daily News, Gays should welcome this move by Mormons, is also worth reading.

Rauch takes the position that:

By coming forward to support new gay-rights protections, the church has publicly and pointedly broken with the confrontational approach of evangelicals, the Catholic Bishops and culture-warrior litigation groups like Alliance Defending Freedom. By doing so, it weakens those groups’ polarizing strategies and their claims to speak for religious conservatives.

If the Mormons’ outreach falls on deaf ears with gay-rights activists, religious hard-liners will gleefully say, “We told you so; gay-rights advocates are interested in fighting, not talking.”

Of course, some negotiations fail. But it would be self-defeating for gay civil-rights advocates not to probe the possibilities for compromise.

There are many gay people for whom allowing religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws—any religious exemptions—has now become anathema. This is a fairly recent development, promoted by those who seem dismissive of any right to religious dissent. It’s another sign of the abject polarization of our times.

More. Via the L.A. Times, An embrace that swayed the Mormon Church on gay rights. Mormon and gay-rights leaders spent five years exchanging views in back-channel talks. It won’t matter to progressive absolutists who reject any compromise that recognizes the value of religious liberty.

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Endgame, with Residual Resistance

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There’s going to be a certain amount of last-ditch intransigence to marriage equality, especially in the deep South, as personified by Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, among others. As the New York Times reports, “Republican state legislators in Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas have introduced bills this year that would prohibit state or local government employees from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, despite federal court rulings declaring bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.”

This smacks of desperation, and a last-gasp effort to incite the base. But marriage equality is not abortion; the freedom to marry does not involve ending the life of an unborn child. Hundreds of thousands will not march on Washington in protest, year after year.

The fact that so many GOP leaders are talking about accepting the appellate rulings (and, by extension, the upcoming Supreme Court decision) and moving on is testament to that. And, as the Huffington Post notes, even Conservatives At Iowa Freedom Summit Would Rather Not Talk About Gay Marriage. Many of them, at any rate. They know it’s over.

Mike Huckabee and and Judge Moore are outliers. It will pass. In the meantime, this is certainly an interesting response.

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Liberals vs. Progressives?

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Allum Bokhari, a British political consultant and Liberal Democrat, has penned an interesting column in which he finds a growing gulf between the views of moderate liberals and radical progressives on a number of key social issues. He writes:

The coalition of moderate liberals, skeptical intellectuals, and radical progressives that once stood together against the conservative “moral majority” is beginning to fracture. … [A] number of serious divisions have emerged on the cultural left. And they are becoming increasingly bitter. …

On Islamism:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a female genital mutilation survivor…was disinvited from a planned speaking engagement at Brandeis University for her criticism of Islam, and was stripped of her honorary degree. Salon.com immediately applauded the decision. … Students at UC Berkeley attempted to do the same to Bill Maher over his alleged islamophobia. … One of their [progressives] core beliefs is that you do not “punch down”—that is, attack vulnerable or marginalized communities. Islam, despite being the dominant religion of dozens of nation-states, is said by progressives to fall into this category. …

On due process:

These days…defenders of due process are more likely to be at loggerheads with radical progressives than Bush-era neocons. Nowadays, it is progressives, not conservatives, who championed the use of campus tribunals to deal with sexual assault on US campuses. These tribunals, conducted by untrained faculty members, with no requirement for defendants to have access to legal representation, have attracted a growing tide of criticism. …

On censorship:

Today…it is progressives who are not just standing up for the right of private censorship, but also actively demand it. It is progressives, not Christian conservatives, who now lead campaigns against sex and violence in the media. And it was progressive students, not middle-aged moral crusaders, who banned a pop song on over 20 university campuses. …

Bokhari concludes:

It increasingly appears that cultural politics, once the great strength of the left-wing movement, is rapidly turning into its Achilles heel. Once a source of unity, it has turned into perhaps the primary source of division. With moderate liberals and radical progressives sharpening their weapons on a number of fronts, a battle for the soul of the left is about to begin.

I fear that’s way too optimistic an outloook, at least when applied to the U.S. From what I can see, there aren’t many “moderate liberals” in this country who are willing to speak out against “radical progressives,” especially regarding due process protections and freedom of expression, although libertarians certainly are doing so.

More. For those who are interested, more from Allum Bokhari, via Britain’s Liberal Democratic Voice website.

Furthermore. Along somewhat similar lines, Jonathan Chait on How the language police are perverting liberalism:

But political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves. …

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

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Obama: Good for Gays, Not So Good for America

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According to Mark Joseph Stein and J. Bryan Lowder, writing at Slate (LGBT Comes to the SOTU), Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address was historic in that it contained three references to gay rights and “marks the first time a president has used the words transgender and bisexual in a State of the Union address (in addition to the explicit use of the term lesbian rather than the generic gay).”

For many on the left, it seems, keeping count of nomenclature is exceedingly important. But I’ll grant you that inclusive rhetoric can matter. More importantly, however, let’s weigh the administration’s record.

The Employee Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), then backed by many LGBT Democrats, never made it out of committee during the first two years of the Obama presidency when his party enjoyed large majorities in both houses of Congress—a sign of lack of administration interest in pushing it. But last year, the president belatedly fulfilled his 2008 campaign promise to issue an executive order barring government contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

His administration sat back and would have allowed Harry Reid to scuttle a Senate vote to end “don’t ask, don’t tell” at the end of 2010, as I’ve written about before (Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman saved the day). Subsequently, however, the Defense Department moved to successfully implement the new policy of letting gays and lesbians serve openly in the military.

Obama initially ran for president opposing gay marriage, alluding to marriage’s “religious connotation” and holding that “marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.” But in office his position evolved to support for marriage equality. And while the truly historic advances for the freedom to marry were driven by lawsuits and the courts, the administration did weigh in against the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act. After the majority ruling penned by Justice Kennedy (a Reagan appointee) finding DOMA unconstitutional, federal agencies have moved to ensure equal treatment of same-sex spouses in the areas that they regulate.

As David Boaz sums up on The National Interest website about the speech and, more broadly, Obama’s legacy:

[W]e got a sweeping vision of a federal government that takes care of us from childhood to retirement, a verbal counterpart to the Obama campaign’s internet ad about “Julia,” the cartoon character who has no family, friends, church or community and depends on government help throughout her life. … The spirit of American independence, of free people pursuing their dreams in a free economy, was entirely absent. … The president wants more and better jobs. And yet he wants to raise taxes on the savings and investment that produce economic growth and better jobs. … President Obama’s tax-spend-and-regulate policies have given us the slowest recovery since World War II. You want to help the middle class? Lift those burdens.

But also:

I appreciate the president’s inclusiveness in his rhetoric and his policies. In 2013, he paid tribute to “Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.” This year he cited gay marriage as “a story of freedom”—indeed, his only mention of freedom—and he touched on the deepest roots of our liberty and our civilization in this passage: “we are a people who value the dignity and worth of every citizen: man and woman, young and old, black and white, Latino and Asian, immigrant and Native American, gay and straight, Americans with mental illness or physical disability.”

All in all, the Obama administration’s record on gay rights may be its only lasting positive legacy.

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Huckabee’s Non Sequitur

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“Christians who themselves abandoned the primacy of lifelong marriage to follow the divorce and remarriage customs of a secular society have as much to answer for as do those who militantly push to redefine marriage,” Mike Huckabee reportedly says in his new book. Actually, there’s no contest—divorce, while sometimes necessary in light of domestic violence or unresolvable incompatibility, by its very definition renders families asunder and denies children the presence of one of their parents in the home (and, often, in their lives). Same-sex marriage creates or reinforces families and provides children with the added safety and security of two legal custodial parents.

Huckabee may be inching away from some of his worst rhetoric of the past, but he still can’t bring himself to see that gay families are not anti-family.

More. Social conservatives can always count on Mike.

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