In an effort to better indoctrinate students’ minds with liberal propaganda and buzz words, Residential Life held their inaugural Vandiversity Week last month. Sponsored in part by the Dean of Students, the Dean of Commons, and VSG, as well as the standard diversity-promoting groups like the Black Cultural Center, the GLBT Resource Office, VU Lambda, and the Office of Active Citizenship and Service (Do the Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards ring a bell?), Vandiversity Week promoted itself as a “great week of dialogue and discussion.”
The fun-filled week kicked off with a lecture inspiringly titled “The Skeleton in Our Closet: Misremembering America’s Racial Cleansings” and included “I’m Not Prejudiced…Am I?”, a panel discussion billed and held as a chance to examine our hidden prejudices. To be fair, writing a column about the ridiculousness of an entire week devoted to raising awareness about diversity, perhaps the most prominent issue on a typical American college campus, would have been the easy way out. Nay, this intellectually curious writer decided to attend a Vandiversity event with the clear intentions of observing and judging the veracity of the discussion based on those observations.
I chose to attend “Gods and Gays,” supposedly an “an in-depth discussion about homosexuality, religion, and how or if they co-exist,” on Tuesday evening. The event was referred to as VU Lambda’s first Closet Conversation of the school year, and I was anxious to see how representatives from the gay and religious communities would approach a rather touchy subject. The discussion began with an introduction from each of the thirty-something attendees, and I discovered that a large number of them were Residence Life staff members, the office sponsoring Vandiversity Week. Others in attendance included the president and other members of Lambda, Divinity School staff members, and a sprinkling of representatives of religious organizations. There to lead the discussion were Vanderbilt philosophy professors Ellen Armour and Jose Medina, themselves homosexuals.
Many of the opportunities that a forum on religion and homosexuality presented to allow for the many different views on these issues never materialized. The conversation began by opening the floor to questions for Armour and Medina. This structure seemed to cast the tone of the discussion from the get-go; the experts would consist of two gay professors that approached the topics from a similar, liberal position. Indeed, after Armour had given her response to the first question of the night, Medina picked up with “I agree with pretty much everything she said”, before reiterating many of the same points his colleague had just made.
Early in the discussion, Armour rhetorically asked whether the two issues of God and homosexuality were incompatible. She proceeded to answer in the negative, explaining that the idea of God is subjective and depends on an individual’s personal conception of God. This view is not surprising in its lack of parameter, particularly from a liberal professor, but it seemed unfortunate that an opposing view of God and homosexuality was never presented. This lack of a conservative religious viewpoint seemed to box the conversation in with the constraint that religion and homosexuality are, without a doubt, two compatible ideas, a disservice to the purpose of the night: an open dialogue and possible debate about religion and homosexuality. This post-modern, academic approach would be indicative of a trend throughout the entire night.
According to Armour and Medina, the idea of tolerance of homosexuals is outdated and ineffective, as it still casts members of their community as outsiders to be “tolerated.” Instead, Medina charged people to “appreciate” or even “celebrate” homosexuality and members of that community. This statement indicates a very important aspect of the so-called “progressive” agenda; some people must be induced to abandon their beliefs for a set of acceptable beliefs, including those about homosexuals. Not once throughout the entire discussion was the possibility raised that an objection to homosexuality, on moral grounds or otherwise, could be legitimate. For a discussion with such a general title and an apparent freedom of discussion, this seems like a large omission detrimental to the free exchange of ideas.
The flaw of the idea for acceptance is that it disallows any compromise between the GLBT community and conservative religious groups. According to a handout at the discussion, nearly all the major world religions object to homosexual actions. To ask for conservative adherents to these religions to view homosexual relationships with the same reverence as a heterosexual one is to expect a people to change a part of their fundamental beliefs about the relationship between God and man. The refusal to accept the normalcy of homosexuality does not equate to rampant persecution of homosexuals—people are able to believe something without assaulting another human being. Individuals deserve the freedom to choose whether or not to accept the homosexual lifestyle based on their own moral, religious, intellectual, and cultural perceptions. Rather than discuss this more fundamental issue of personal belief, Armour and Medina chose instead implicitly to ignore a widespread point of view in the name of “progression.”
Most shocking about the discussion was its focus on identity politics. Medina spoke about the diversity of sexual identities beyond heterosexuality, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersexed. This smorgasbord of identities appears to be a progressive way of viewing sexual orientation, but the acronym GLBTQQI doesn’t look ridiculous by coincidence. The ever-expanding world of sexual politics seems to further divide and pigeonhole people into interest groups for the purposes of forwarding a political agenda, which appears to run counter to its promotion of all-encompassing “tolerance.” The focus on sexual identities was even extended to a look at religious, class, race, and ethnic identities, but at what point do these groups of division stop supporting the individuals within them and begin to advance a sinister cause masked as “social justice?”
To what purpose does an increasingly diverse array of identities, sexual or otherwise, serve politics? Since at least the 1960’s, liberal Democrats in the United States have capitalized on identity politics. The party has increasingly depended on the placing of people of personal identities into interest groups. Rather than create positive coalitions of political groups of people, the Democratic Party lays claim to the cause of social justice and attempts to convince the numerous interest groups it creates to join in this cause against the “white, Christian, straight male” establishment. From blacks to women to gays, the Democrats proudly proclaim to be the party of every gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation interest group. It serves the liberal cause politically to further divide people into more and more groups to ensure that every voter feels that their own personal interests are being attended to.
While identity politics may provide the cause of social justice with political expediency, it is very dangerous to the cause of individual liberty. Americans, and university students especially, should be committed to promoting freedom for people because they are human, not because they fit into a superficial classification. Issues like gay marriage should be debated in a context where all people’s views on marriage, regardless of difference, are acknowledged as legitimate in the debate. Instead, as with the “Gods and Gays” discussion, there seems to be an assumption of agreement where there should be acknowledgement of disagreement.
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