Republicans are always looking for a way to make themselves look like the common folk, to convince the HVAC guy, the painter, carpenter, electrician, tradesman the Democrats are "egg heads" who despise them for being common, and who think themselves superior to those who did not go to college.
In "What's The Matter with Kansas" a father seethes about how East Coast liberal faculty judge his son inadequate because his SAT scores are insufficient to get him into Princeton, despite his many talents: The kid can and has rewired the house, rebuilt the family truck, put in a new engine and transmission, kayaked down a class three river, scaled sheer rocky ledges and placed third in the county wrestling tournament.
He's right, of course: the sacred meritocracy sees and too often rewards spurious or irrelevant merit, while missing real talent.
And then, there is the question of pronouns, which encapsulates so easily the great gap between "liberal" college faculties and even public high school faculties, and the thinking of ordinary citizens who are not, as Republicans from Ron DeSantis to Ted Cruz, delight in saying, "woke enough."
In his Boston Globe piece, a professor at Boston College, says, "I'm .. a straight white-cis-male...and I strive to make my classroom as inclusive as possible." So he goes around the room and has students introduce themselves using this code, i.e., "share their pronouns." But, "as my students began filing out of the classroom, one lagged behind, visibly distraught. They asked if they could talk to me about the way I ran the introductions. They identified as non-binary and used they/them pronouns, but they felt exposed and vulnerable when I told them to share that. I didn't make them feel included. I made them feel unsafe."
Let me say, in all caps, neon lights: NOBODY SHOULD BE DISPARGED OR DEMEANED FOR THEIR SEXUALITY, SKIN COLOR OR ANY TRAIT THEY CANNOT CONTROL. WE OUGHT TO JUDGE PEOPLE ON THEIR BEHAVIOR.
Having said all this, there is no good argument for the 99.9% of the population who has grown up from age 18 months learning and speaking English with pronouns which designate male as he/him or she/her to shift over to new pronouns.
You can be kind and considerate of gender fluid or non binary folk without trying to speak new gender speak and that 0.1% among us can accommodate to not being referred to as "they."
Beyond that, no school, and especially colleges, private or public--and BU is private--should attempt to be "safe places."
Students, straight or gay, binary or otherwise, should go to college to challenge their own assumptions, to find no safe harbor for their deeply held convictions about sexuality, religion, politics, ethics, morality or philosophy. A college which seeks to be a "safe" place in fact ceases to be a college at all, but does, in fact expose itself to be a place of indoctrination rather than examination.
I do wish that it were possible to discuss, dispassionately, analytically and thoroughly, the questions which gender fluidity, transgender medicine, gender dysphoria, heterosexuality and homosexuality open. I gather, having had no personal or recent experience on a college campus or in a high school classroom, this is not an option.
Even at medical conferences, a political correctness has become so thoroughly institutionalized, without adequate discussion, that objective discussion freed from moral invective is not currently possible.
But I do know one thing, when Ted Cruz says, "I talked to a student recently at one of our woke campuses who said she is required in every class to introduce herself and to give her pronouns...Well, I'm Ted Cruz and my pronoun is 'kiss my ass.'"
And no matter how loathsome you may find Ted Cruz, you know one thing, he will get applause and delighted approval with that line.
Republicans cannot win over voters with their policies: They want to kill Medicare, Social Security, destroy the planet, deny climate change, drive gas guzzling pick up trucks, mine coal, ban abortion, call the rescue of a mother with an ectopic "pregnancy" murder of a child, make Donald Trump President for Life, support Vladimir Putin in his atrocious war against Ukraine, eliminate the separation of church and state, make Christianity the national established religion, send non white immigrants away and generally create a new Third Reich in America--so they have to look for "cultural" divides to attract voters to their side.
And they have found one, served up to them by liberal Democrats who would rather be pure than powerful, who would rather lose every election for the next twenty years than part with their own self image of righteousness. They want to be pure, damn the consequences.
And when I say "they" I'm speaking of the plural.
