At least he saved himself for marriage...

Tuesday, cigarette #2
Outside the dining hall, 1:45pm

The consensus over at IvyGate seems to be that the take-away lesson from l'Affaire Anscombe is that anyone who believes Ivy League campuses are hostile to conservative ideas is rubber room material. While no one in my circle at Yale has ever been beaten with an Orangina bottle, they have been intimidated with disciplinary action in a way that liberals aren't.

Consider the NOGAYS incident: on last year's National Coming Out Day, an unknown group of students hung up posters around campus with pictures of celebrities announcing that they were "coming out" as this or that (Mel Gibson as an anti-Semite, Joe Lieberman as a Republican, and, most surreally, Orlando Bloom as a city in Florida). At the bottom was the slogan: "Admitting it doesn't make it right" (which is true). These posters purported to be sponsored by the National Organization to Gain Acceptance for Your Sins. An email to similar effect was sent to the entire student body the same morning.

The email was anonymous, but the administration tracked the IP address to two poor souls to whom they proceeded to read the riot act. The LGBTQ Co-Op was crying for blood and expulsions. (Well, not all of them; some wanted to respond by throwing a dance and calling it the "Gay Bash.") Because Yale's free speech policy protects satire, these students could only be disciplined for violating Yale's email policy, which prohibits mass emailing. In practice, the policy doesn't stop the fraternities and comedy troupes from mass emailing when they have a party or a show coming up, and very rarely with any disciplinary consequences. The administration's reason for going after the NOGAYS emailers was transparently ideological.

Now, I actually liked the NOGAYS posters. The message behind them wasn't We should go back to the days when being gay meant that your friends and family treated you like a space alien! It was, Okay, LGBTQ Co-Op, you've done a good job making the Yale campus a safe place for people to figure out their sexuality, and that's genuinely great, but you have done absolutely nothing to respond to people who oppose your identity not because it makes them go 'Ewww!' but because they've thought about it and decided after sober consideration that it's a sin. In fact, by labeling everyone who thinks gay sex is a sin a 'bigot', you've made the Yale campus unsafe for people who want to figure out the answer to that question! The irony — do you get it? The way you can tell that the satire worked is that the idea behind the satirical slogan ("Admitting it doesn't make it right!") was repeated almost exactly by the people being satirized: “[The Day] is about accepting diversity within our own community . . . you can come out as whatever."

To bring the story back around to poor Mr. Nava: a lot of people were upset with the NOGAYS emailers for hiding behind anonymity, but anonymity is fine when the cost of standing behind your posters is being punished for hate speech. It wasn't just stern looks that the NOGAYS emailers were being threatened with. Even if Nava has cost campus conservatives the moral high ground (assuming we ever had any!), that doesn't mean that every report of a hostile liberal campus is just paranoia.