Conservative, bisexual, and latino: Professor forced to quit hellish teaching experience

From Red Alert: Even when conservative professors earn tenure, the academic experience can get unbearable.

Professor Robert Lopez of California State University-Northridge was happy to receive his tenure in May 2013. The achievement is particularly difficult for conservative professors. Three years later, however, Lopez was ready to leave, writing about the “salvation” he’s found and how he’s “quitting because I found the will to live.”

Lopez, who is bisexual and Latino, has written about problems he faced on campus months after obtaining tenure for expressing his conservative views. In October 2013, “The Devil Comes Home to Cal State Northridge” was published for American Thinker. “I confessed that I admired Palin to a colleague, and he immediately compared me to Hitler,” Lopez wrote.

The reactions against Lopez didn’t stop with the Hitler comparison. People were rude and denounced him. His applications for benefits were rejected, as were department newsletter submissions. He couldn’t get on committees, and faculty members whom he called “the Marxist Brothers” held closed-door meetings about him.

Lopez “had people carve threatening lines over the Army stickers on my door, tear my American flag, and throw flyers at me.”

He was not allowed to use university resources for anything political, but his colleagues were held to different standards.

“Anything I did, on the job or off, that alluded remotely to my not being a leftist counted as political and was therefore grounds for complaint and possible sanction,” he wrote.

As Lopez chronicles his worsening experiences, a common theme is “the constant stream of ‘it has come to my attention’ messages.”

Last month, American Thinker published “The True Story of a Conservative Refugee.” Lopez describes how he became convinced that someone had been going through his personal items, which he had suspected for years. He described more of the complaints against him, including one which led to a tribunal:

The epic Title IX tribunal over my conference at the Reagan Presidential Library is still now, to this day, open and undecided after 600 days. The case was based on a gay student claiming he had a nervous breakdown because of anti-gay “targeting” at the Reagan Library and a woman who claimed I did not nominate her for an award because she alleged that the five female speakers at the Reagan Library were “anti-female.”

The investigation of Lopez, and the risk of suspension, highlights the hypocrisy of campus culture. At other universities, professors who made anti-Republican comments received pay raises, a stark contrast to Lopez being forced out.

Lopez felt forced to teach a certain way because he couldn’t trust his students and “was teaching like a robot.” He also suspected that his colleagues were “planting students in my class to annoy me.” Lopez went through lengths of only accepting digital papers, of no longer providing comments on papers, and of letting students write about whatever they wanted.

Lopez told The College Fix that he stood up for “racial and ethnic diversity in literature and staffing.” With calls for diversity from students, particularly when it comes to assigned literature, there could have been common ground for Lopez and his detractors.

It wasn’t enough for those out to get him.

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Churches & The Left

Robert Oscar Lopez writes:

When we were fighting against gay marriage, we made a huge tactical error in thinking we had to fight in the courts and media first, trusting that the churches would be safe. I fell for this delusion as well. As I pointed out in a recent conference in London (“The New Normal”), I followed many others’ leads and minimized the churches’ influence on my position, for fear of being tied in people’s minds to “old church ladies telling people what to do.” After half a decade of this, I’ve realized that “old church ladies” are the most important group to get on our side, and we have to have their confidence first. Why? Unlike everybody else, they show up and bring food. On their often unacknowledged labor rested most of the breakthrough moments I saw in the fight against leftist propaganda, not only in the United States but also in France and the United Kingdom.

It is alluring but fanciful to dream of winning over secular feminists and prestigious men in suits, but these would-be partners are notoriously slippery. I tried, for instance to open up a dialogue with innumerable liberal feminists in hopes we could build a coalition. Queer feminists Yasmin Nair, Claire Potter, Cathy Brennan, Sheena Malhotra, and others all reacted to my attempts to engage them in authentic conversation with paranoid recoil, feeling the need to repudiate or even viciously attack me in public lest their liberal allies think they were really in league with me. Other liberal feminists such as Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy and Laura Kipnis were hot & cold interlocutors, willing at times to share thoughts but then prone to close doors on key positions such as defense of life and/or the opposition to sodomy.

From time to time, there would be gay men who looked willing to engage in real discussion. I brought queer theorist Tim Dean to my campus to deliver a speech on Tom Jones in 2013. I agreed to speak on a panel hosted by playwright Tony Abbatemarco after a performance of Forever House. I even exchanged some messages with Frank Ligtvoet, a gay adoptive father, and hired a gay actor to play the lead in the premier of the play I co-wrote with Michelle Shocked, Sunlight. All these attempts ended up leaving me drained and exhausted, because in the end, such crossover discussants always wanted a veto to block discussion of the central issues they considered non-starters. I call this phenomenon “lefty creep.”

Highly esteemed conservative straight men can be nearly as frustrating. If they have sinecures or some kind of emeritus status in the movement, most likely they only want new advocates to emerge if they have personally mentored them. The effect of this is that the movement remains small, incestuous, and dull.

The beauty of church-focused social movements is that they offer a quick route to the grassroots and rely on long-established networks of trust and familiarity. Churches are a good offense against propaganda because of the physical resources alone: for instance, the multitude of multipurpose rooms, reading rooms, furniture, and props that spend much of the American workweek unused. Additionally, churches are a badly needed defensive theater, because the left has spent large amounts of money on promoting a false theology favorable to their pet causes like same-sex marriage. If churches at the local level block people with false theological grounding from taking over pastorates, this will protect the whole conservative movement as anti-propagandists fight on other fronts, such as…

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Queer Theory and BDS: The Odd Couple

Rivka Edelman writes:

For the past two years Boycott Divest Sanction, (BDS) the growing college campus movement against Israel, has put every Jewish student and many faculty in its crosshairs. It is the latest incarnation of anti-Semitism to garner the rubber stamp of approval in the academy, a stamp usually reserved for the very PC fields like feminism, Queer Studies and LGBT rights.

The queer movement and BDS actually flow from a shared cultural source, a zeitgeist. That these two movements go hand in hand should not strike anyone as odd considering both movements share, not only toxic tactics, (calling people genocidal murders as they try to make their way from class to class), but also revisionist history of faux victimization, (think of that widely circulated photograph of the dead baby, who was killed by the Israelis in 2007, and killed again in 2009, and yet again in 2014) and violent rhetoric.

The connection runs deeper. They also share a spokesperson, Professor Judith Butler, an Americ academic version of a public intellectual. Judith Butler, once Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, is a literary theorist and a political activist, best known for coining the phrase, “gender is performative” (an observation that was made in the Talmud centuries before Butler). If it were the 1970s and the humanities had rock stars Butler would be their Mick Jagger. BDS was lucky to book her for their gigs. As Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors, states:

“Judith Butler, who has become the movement’s premier philosopher and political theorist, is perhaps the foremost among them. Her work, which carries significant authority among humanists, helps us get to the heart of the movement’s guiding principles.”

As an advocate for BDS, Butler’s has cachet, publications and a background of political “activism.” In this case it is a brand of activism that seems to channel the American conviction “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” She lends a thin veneer of legitimacy to the unsavory notion that if gilt in postmodern jargon, the attitude of “really pissed off, STFU pissed off” is an ethical and philosophical position based on some agreed truth.

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When Gangs Killed Gay Men for Sport: Australia Reviews 88 Deaths

So how would these Australian gangs figure out who were the gay men to push off the cliffs? The New York Times article doesn’t describe the anonymous sex that must’ve been going on in these gay hangouts above the cliffs.

New York Times:

SYDNEY, Australia — On a December day in 1988, a teenager on a spearfishing expedition found a body at the bottom of one of the wild, honey-colored sandstone cliffs that line Sydney Harbor.
Naked, torn and battered by the rocks, the dead man was a promising American mathematician, Scott Johnson. His clothes were found at the top of the cliff in a neat pile with his digital watch, student ID and a $10 bill, folded in a small plastic sheath. There was no wallet, and no note.
The police concluded that Mr. Johnson, 27, had committed suicide, and a coroner agreed. Fatal leaps from the cliffs around Sydney into the fierce sea below were not uncommon, then or now.
But 28 years later, a new inquest into Mr. Johnson’s death has begun. His brother, a wealthy Boston tech entrepreneur, has pressed the Australian authorities for years to revisit the case, arguing that Mr. Johnson was murdered because he was gay and that the police failed to see it.
If so, it appears Mr. Johnson may not have been the only one.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the Australian authorities now say, gangs of teenagers in Sydney hunted gay men for sport, sometimes forcing them off the cliffs to their deaths. But the police, many of whom had a reputation for hostility toward gay men, often carried out perfunctory investigations that overlooked the possibility of homicide, former officials and police officers say.
Now the police in New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney, are reviewing the deaths of 88 men between 1976 and 2000 to determine whether they should be classified as anti-gay hate crimes.
About 30 of the cases remain unsolved, and the police have not said how many of the killings were tied to gangs. About a dozen victims were found dead at the bottom of cliffs or in the sea, the police say.
The review and the inquest into Mr. Johnson’s death are casting light on a shocking chapter of Sydney’s history, one that some say has yet to be fully revealed.
“We can now see that predators were attacking gay men,” said Ted Pickering, who was the police minister for New South Wales in the late 1980s. “And they were doing it with the almost-certain knowledge that the police would not have gone after them. That was the police culture of the day.”

Robert Oscar Lopez writes:

In Proverbs 7, Solomon embarks on an extended fable of a young man being sexually enticed by a “loose woman,” who stands as a counter-symbol against “Wisdom.”

In this chapter the Bible continues the personification of Wisdom as a woman, though this time, it is specified as a “sister”: “Say to wisdom, you are my sister, and call insight your intimate friend; to preserve you from the loose woman, from the adventuress with her smooth words” (7:4-5).

Often we have a habit in everyday speech of associating sexual experience with “knowledge” or even “wisdom,” such as when we say someone has a lot of carnal knowledge or someone’s got “wisdom beyond their years” because they started having sex at a young age.

Here, however, wisdom is cast as antithetical to sexual adventure. Yet the loose woman, lacking as she is in wisdom, does not present herself as unwise, as in transparently naive or stupid. Rather, she is wily and falsely wise, or disordered in her use of knowledge. Solomon says that he looked through the lattice of window to see “a young man without sense, passing along the street near the corner, taking the road to her house, in the twilight, in the evening, in the time of night and darkness” (7:7-9).

With this framework, we are set up to read the young man as someone who is largely to blame for his sexual ruin, because he is violating many of the ideas that have preceded in Proverbs 1-6. He has not the sense to understand that he cannot trust himself in vulnerable contexts. It is the fool who thinks he can wander close to a lusty woman’s home when it is dark outside. The temptation is too grave.

Yet much of the sexual fall results from the loose woman’s own carefully selected words. She misrepresents herself consciously because she is “dressed as a harlot, wily of heart” (7:10). After grabbing the boy and kissing him, she states, “I had to offer sacrifices and today I have paid my vows, so now I have come out to meet you, to seek you eagerly” (7:14-15). Why this line about the loose woman claiming that she has partaken dutifully in her vows and rites?

It would seem that Solomon includes the line about the loose woman’s ruse of holiness because he wants the vulnerable to understand that seducers often misrepresent themselves as pious, thereby taking their victims off guard. The woman appeals to the young man’s love of sensual pleasures and fineries, as she mentions her perfume and the Egyptian linen of her bed. Also, she mentions that her husband is away on business, having taken a bag of money with him.

The man cannot resist her talk and her ruses, so “all at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a stag is caught.” (7:22-23).

For the ex-gay Christian the fable resonates even without the heterosexual dynamic of the older woman seducing a young, innocent man. The underlying problem of sexual vulnerability is that those with the intent to despoil others sexually have usually had a great deal of practice and often embark with a careful strategy. Only arrogance can lead someone to believe that they can stand alone, dancing with sin, without getting dirty.

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Jews Love Being Jewish, Blacks Love Being Black

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I think Steve has remarked before that blacks really like being black. And it seems true. Blacks really seem to enjoy being black. They’re obsessed with being black. This whole victim stuff lets blacks enjoy being black and nurse their obsession while holding the moral high ground and not come across as completely self-absorbed and gloating (even though that’s manifestly obvious to any non deluded individual) which normally detracts from one holding the moral high ground.

* Salma Hayek can have ALL my Pokemon Points anytime she wants.

* When considering Hayek’s carefully argued position on identity and privilege, two points really stand out.

* Hey Salma, come on over to my place and let’s get “intersectional” while listening to some Barry White, who’s both White and black.

* Mexico is not exactly well-known for color blind casting:

Mestizo actors conspicuously absent from commercial ads in Mexico

Light-skinned actors get the vast majority of roles in television commercials in Mexico, laying bare the racism that persists in this majority mestizo nation.

“Commercials for consumer products require an aspirational profile, and that is white with light eyes, medium height and between 25 and 45 years old. The international Latino type,” actor Rodrigo Franco, president of the National Interpreters Association, told EFE.

The 51-year-old Franco, who is 1.56 meters (5-foot-1) in height and has “typical Mexican” features, said he had faced repeated discrimination in the advertising and acting worlds.

He said that unfair treatment had included being asked by a director to furnish an acting degree at an audition for a part as a construction worker and being kicked off a set by a security guard who said he could not be part of the cast because of his appearance.

Options for the “native Mexican” are restricted to commercials on government programs, which make up just 5 percent of television ads, Franco said.

In August 2013, a casting call sparked outrage. Mexico’s flagship air carrier, Aeromexico, said it was looking for actors and actresses for one of its commercials but specified that it wanted “nobody dark-skinned.”

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