These hateful people are tomorrow’s ruling class. By Rod Dreher.
At a recent event as Yale Law School, sponsored by the Federalist Society, conservative Christian lawyer Kristin Waggoner and liberal atheist lawyer Monica Miller discussed areas of common ground in defending First Amendment rights.
It degenerated into a debacle because of the Yale Law School students. A student mob tried to disrupt the event inside the room. Then, after they were thrown out by a law school professor who told them to “grow up”:
The protesters proceeded to exit the event … but congregated in the hall just outside. Then they began to stomp, shout, clap, sing, and pound the walls, making it difficult to hear the panel. Chants of “protect trans kids” and “shame, shame” reverberated throughout the law school. The din was so loud that it disrupted nearby classes, exams, and faculty meetings, according to students and a professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ellen Cosgrove, the associate dean of the law school, was present at the panel the entire time. Though the cacophony clearly violated Yale’s free speech policies, she did not confront any of the protesters. …
“It was disturbing to witness law students whipped into a mindless frenzy,” Waggoner said. “I did not feel it was safe to get out of the room without security.”
As the panel concluded, police officers arrived to escort Waggoner and Miller out of the building. Three members of the Federalist Society say they were told that the Dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerken, called the police, though the law school declined to comment on who asked for extra security. …
In the two days following the panel, more than 60 percent of the law school’s student body signed an open letter supporting the “peaceful student protesters,” who they claimed had been imperiled by the presence of police.
“The danger of police violence in this country is intensified against Black LGBTQ people, and particularly Black trans people,” the letter read. “Police-related trauma includes, but is certainly not limited to, physical harm. Even with all of the privilege afforded to us at YLS, the decision to allow police officers in as a response to the protest put YLS’s queer student body at risk of harm.”
Signed by 417 students, the letter also condemned Stith for telling the protesters to “grow up,” and the Federalist Society for hosting the event, which “profoundly undermined our community’s values of equity and inclusivity.”
Kristin Waggoner pointed out that these students are future federal judges (a vastly disproportionate number of federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, come from either Harvard or Yale law schools), and that this is a very bad sign for the First Amendment.
A closeted Christian law professor in an Ivy League law school, from an interview with Dreher in 2015:
“It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.
But only one side has the power. …
They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good. …
Christians are the new gays:
When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”
On the conservative side, said Kingsfield, Republican politicians are abysmal at making a public case for why religious liberty is fundamental to American life.
“The fact that Mike Pence can’t articulate it, and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t care and can’t articulate it, is shocking,” Kingsfield said. “Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they’re marginal figures. Why can’t Republicans articulate this? …
There is a bitter irony in the fact that gays coming out of the closet coincides with traditional religious people going back into the closet.
Gays have legitimately said that it’s a big deal to have laws and a culture in which they have been forced to lie about who they are …
‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ forced them to segment off a part of their lives in a way that was wrong. What they don’t realize today is that the very same criticism they had about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ can be applied to what is happening now to Christians: you can do what you like in private, but don’t bring who you are into the public square, or you can be punished for it.
Dreher concludes:
The way the abhorrent Yale Law students behaved in a protest supported by a strong majority of Yale Law students, is a sign of steep decline. These hateful people are tomorrow’s ruling class. You may never meet any of them, but once they ascend into the ruling-class institutions, they are going to affect the lives of all of us.
In twenty or thirty years those frenzied students will be in charge of society.
Today’s ruling bureaucrats etc. were educated in the 1990s or so. What progressive nonsense were they taught while no one else was watching?
