The Silencing (10 page)

While the university brushed off the student’s complaints of being silenced, the administration became vigorously engaged when the illiberal left complained about McAdams’s post. Incredibly, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences sent McAdams a letter
³⁷
informing him he was “relieved of all teaching duties and all other faculty activities, including, but not limited to, advising, committee work, faculty meetings and any activity that would involve your interaction with Marquette students, faculty and staff.” He was ordered to stay off campus while he was being
investigated for an unnamed transgression. Enclosed was a copy of Marquette’s harassment policy, which appears to be modeled on Chairman Mao’s
Little Red Book
. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), screenshots of a faculty training session on the policy include “a slide about hypothetical peers Becky and Maria, who ‘have been talking about their opposition to same-sex marriage.’ Hans overhears the conversations, is offended, and reports the two for harassment. Hans’s action is condoned.”
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It’s hard to imagine a more intellectually chilling policy than one that turns students and faculty into informants and punishes them for discussing issues in a manner not sanctioned by university authorities.

When a reporter inquired about the investigation against McAdams, a Marquette spokesperson straight out of Orwell’s
1984
asserted that McAdams had violated the university’s “Guiding Values to which all faculty and staff are required to adhere, and in which the dignity and worth of each member of our community is respected, especially students.” Clearly Marquette’s “Guiding Values” don’t apply to students who oppose same-sex marriage. Marquette was also violating its expressed commitment to free speech in its official handbook, which states, “It is clearly inevitable, and indeed essential, that the spirit of inquiry and challenge that the university seeks to encourage will produce many conflicts of ideas, opinions and proposals for action.”
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Due process was also out the window. McAdams was not informed of his offense, nor was he given an opportunity to defend himself. This treatment blatantly violates another one of Marquette’s show documents, the faculty handbook, which states
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that the university protects professors’ “full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.” Apparently, Marquette’s professed commitments to their students and professors are trumped by their enigmatic and creepy “Guiding Values.” One might also note the irony of an orthodox Catholic position on marriage being ruled as outside the bounds of legitimate discussion at a Catholic university at
the hands of the illiberal left who dominate or run so many college and university campuses.

With the illiberal left in charge, even favored academics can go from victor to villain in an instant if they adopt the wrong perspective. University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock was well-respected on the left for his work on liberal causes such as defending a Muslim prisoner’s right to grow a beard while incarcerated in an Arkansas prison and co-writing an amicus brief in
United States v. Windsor
arguing in favor of same-sex marriage. But Laycock’s support took a hit when his interpretation of the Constitution led to what the illiberal left considered the wrong conclusions. In the lightning-rod Supreme Court case
Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
, Laycock supported Hobby Lobby, arguing in an amicus brief that the government should not force corporations to provide health insurance covering birth control against their religious beliefs. Laycock also organized a letter to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, cosigned by ten professors at other law schools and sent on University of Virginia School of Law letterhead, arguing that a controversial proposed Arizona law (SB 1062) that would allow businesses to deny service to gays and lesbians based on religious conviction was a necessary and constitutionally sound strengthening of the law to protect religious freedom. I vigorously and publicly disagreed with Laycock’s interpretation in this case but never felt the need to try to delegitimize him as a scholar. Two University of Virginia student activists, Gregory Lewis and Stephanie Montenegro were less tolerant of Laycock’s conclusions that didn’t support their worldview. The duo released an open letter addressed
⁴¹
to Laycock expressing concern with work he had done which they believed was aiding opponents of LGBT rights and those who were resisting providing contraception under the Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”). They argued that they wanted “professors to fully understand the implications of their academic work,” as if Laycock should always interpret the Constitution in a way that supports left-wing ideological preferences. The students were not remotely self-conscious about nakedly admitting to supporting some of Laycock’s
academic conclusions (the ones that fit with their activist agenda) but not those that didn’t support their views. At no point did the students make a legal argument that undermined Laycock’s conclusions, or any legal argument at all. They merely insisted that Laycock change his interpretation of the Constitution because they didn’t like it.

Then, chillingly, they made an argument that has become increasingly common among the illiberal left: liberal political orthodoxy trumps academic freedom. “While academic freedom has immense value within the walls of the classroom,” they wrote, “[we] invite you into a dialogue with UVA students who are negatively impacted by your work. It is vitally important to balance the collective work of our academic community with the collective impact of that work in communities across the country.” They expressed a desire to start a “dialogue” with Laycock and then filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request demanding, among other things, university-funded travel expenses and cell phone records for the past two-and-a-half years. The students asserted that they wanted “a full, transparent accounting of the resources used by Professor Laycock which may be going towards halting the progress of the LGBT community and to erode the reproductive rights of women across the country.”
⁴²
As UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge pointed out at the time, “You don’t start a dialogue with FOIA requests.”
⁴³

No, you don’t. Unless you have invented another definition for the word, which is precisely what the illiberal left has done. A “dialogue” with the illiberal left is one in which they inform you of the “right” way to think. Resistance to their demands will result in your being stuck with labels like bigot, misogynist, homophobe, racist, sexist, or some other toxic moniker that’s alienating to the rest of society.

In 2014 a group of prominent religious leaders sent a letter to the White House asking for a religious exemption to a White House executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT persons in recruitment, hiring, and training.
⁴⁴
At issue was whether religious organizations, which sometimes contract with the federal government—
for instance, in helping with disaster relief—would be barred by the executive order from accepting federal contracts and, if they did accept them, be at risk of anti-discrimination lawsuits. Signers of the letter asking for a religious exemption included the chief executive of Catholic Charities USA, mega-church pastor Rick Warren, and the executive editor of
Christianity Today
. But it was no conservative manifesto. Former Obama staffer Michael Wear rounded up the signatories, which also included pastor Joel Hunter, who prays regularly with the president, and Stephen Schneck, co-chair of Catholics for Obama in 2012.
⁴⁵

An exemption was predictably opposed by the illiberal left—not because they respectfully disagreed with the religious organizations’ position, but because they cast them as bigots. “This would be a catastrophic erosion of non-discrimination protections,” said Kate Kendell of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We
must
tell President Obama loud and clear: no special rights for religious bigotry!!!” wrote activist John Becker. Rachel Maddow asserted on her MSNBC show that the letter was just part of “the floodgates . . . already opening” from the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The genesis of the letter, she said, was about conservatives grabbing “every other conceivable advantage . . . by calling what they want to do that’s otherwise against the law a variety of religious freedom.”
⁴⁶
Members of the illiberal left—from
ThinkProgress
to
Daily Kos
—echoed the claim that the Hobby Lobby decision had ushered in Armageddon for gay rights.
⁴⁷

Instead, what seems most at risk is the freedom of religious organizations to participate in public life when religious beliefs are deemed “bigotry.” As same-sex marriage and civil unions have become legal in more states, the new legal structure has been utilized to attack religious charities with government contracts. In places like Illinois, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia, for example, Catholic Charities has been forced to shut down their adoption and foster care services because the state demanded they place children with same-sex couples in violation of Catholic teaching on marriage and the family.
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“The new intolerance is an everybody problem . . . because it penalizes people who are a clear net plus for society, people who spend their days helping the poor, clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, caring for the cast-off, and otherwise trying to live out the Judeo-Christian code of social justice,” writer Mary Eberstadt said in a 2014
First Things
lecture. “More and more, those people are also witnesses to a terrible truth: the new intolerance makes it harder to help the poor and needy.”

Bethany Christian Services is America’s largest adoption agency with approximately 115 offices across thirty-six states. It was founded in 1944 and has had government contracts to provide foster care and adoption programs for more than sixty years. As a Christian organization, Bethany was able to save the government hundreds of thousands of dollars because it could provide services with the help of volunteers, donated financial capital, and less bureaucracy.

Bethany, however, has recently found itself in a contentious situation. When facilitating private adoptions, Bethany will only place children into two-parent families with a mother and a father. When LGBT couples come to Bethany to adopt children, the organization refers them to other agencies that can help them. Bethany does not prevent LGBT couples from adopting children; as an organization it only asks that it be allowed to follow its orthodox Christian belief system by placing children in two-parent families that have a mother and a father.

But such freedom to practice the organization’s Christian beliefs, while being a government contractor, is in jeopardy. William J. Blacquiere, president and CEO of Bethany, said in an interview, “From the perspective of Bethany, we see the government as a partner. We’ve had contracts with state governments since the 1960s. During that time we had respect for the state’s laws and they respected us. It definitely feels like that respect is disappearing.”

While the illiberal left seems to hold a special animosity to Christianity, it is strangely protective of Islam, despite the fact that orthodox Muslims also oppose same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, the illiberal left labels the religion’s critics as “Islamophobes” suggesting some sort of mental
illness or “phobia” is behind any difference of opinion. Liberal firebrand Bill Maher learned this the hard way. In 2014, the host of HBO’s
Politically Incorrect
got into a heated agreement with actor Ben Affleck about Islam. After atheist writer Sam Harris called Islam, “the motherlode of bad ideas,” Maher added that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f*cking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” Affleck was furious. He pushed back, arguing that Islam was being painted with too broad a brush. Maher cited a Pew poll finding that a large majority of Egyptians felt that if you leave Islam, death was the appropriate retaliation. Maher asked, “If 90 percent of Catholics in Brazil felt the appropriate response to leaving Catholicism was death, wouldn’t that be a slightly bigger story?”

Affleck’s rebuttal to these claims amounted to this: Maher and Harris were “gross” and “racist,” which was enough to make Affleck a hero among the illiberal left. On the
View
, Rosie O’Donnell wanted “Affleck for President!”
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Over at MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared, “I’m with Affleck because knocking someone’s religion is the way to start or escalate a fight. It’s no way to cool one.”
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MSNBC host Krystal Ball said, “I have such a liberal crush now on Ben Affleck. I thought he was so amazing throughout that show, and so strong there.”
⁵¹
MSNBC host Chris Hayes echoed Affleck’s claims that Maher and Harris were saying things that were “gross and racist” because their conversation didn’t include any actual Muslims.
⁵²
Michael Eric Dyson, guest-hosting the
Ed Show
on MSNBC, called Maher a “patron saint of liberals,” but said his argument against Islamic illiberalism reinforced bigotry.
⁵³

Maher’s contempt for Christianity is well known, yet it has barely elicited a peep from the illiberal left. Maher has called the God of the Bible a “d-ck,” a “psychotic mass murderer,” and a “tyrant,”
⁵⁴
and said, “If we were a dog and God owned us, the cops would come and take us away.” The illiberal left is fine with such anti-Christian broadsides, because it accepts, and even promotes, the idea that Christianity is bigoted, but it condemns as off-limits and racist any discussion of Islamic illiberalism.