This whole Kevin Williamson affair is the fault of center-lefties like Nicholas Kristof who go around berating liberals for not being tolerant enough of conservative viewpoints.
Kristof has been bemoaning how conservative views are excluded from the social sciences and whining about the lack of “ideological diversity” of the social science faculties at universities. Not once has Kristof ever told us exactly which conservative viewpoints are excluded, but we are supposed to believe (1) that there is some critical mass of conservative views excluded, and (2) that such views are excluded unfairly.
I have tried to get folks who believe such things to spell out exactly which conservative views are excluded. One person I know who advocated the idea that conservative views are unfairly excluded argued with me for hours on end on the matter without naming one such conservative view that was excluded until he finally relented and guessed that Hayek was being excluded.
Hayek is excluded from college campuses? What did universities do? Shut down business schools?
I don’t think the brouhaha about conservative views being excluded from college campuses is all about non-interventionist economics. What was the last time you saw a conservative setting his hair on fire on cable news about Hayek? That is NOT what sets off conservatives.
I must admit that there are conservative views which do not have legitimacy in the social sciences. That’s because those views have been substantially refuted by the vast body of social science evidence. The exclusion of discussions of those views makes sense. College instructors cannot be expected to spend precious class time and precious reading material resources on every discredited idea just to be “fair.”
I highly suspect I know which conservative ideas these folks are claiming are excluded, and it is the outrageous nature of them that keeps the Kristofs of the world from saying what they are. Conservatives deeply hate the social sciences because a lot of their crazy ideas have been refuted by them:
These ideas range from the notion that gay men are more prone to commit pedophilia than straight men to LGBT persons are inherently mentally ill to the notion that sex, in itself, makes one biologically predisposed to excel at certain tasks to Charles Murray’s fables of race and IQ being inherently linked. If I am wrong let those who complain about conservative viewpoints being excluded from the social science curriculum state exactly which ideas besides these are being excluded (they won’t).
While you wait for the sun to go red giant, let me address one of these, because in understanding the purpose of these ideas’ existence in the first place, you will see why the center lefties went so horribly wrong in their push for ideological diversity.
Conservatives have pushed the idea that gay men are more likely to be pedophiles than straight men, and thus, should be denied their civil rights. There is some irony here. The people who push this argument the most are, overwhelmingly, male. In making this argument, these conservative men acknowledge that men are more likely to engage in pedophilia than women.
If they believe that one should be denied rights because members of their social group are more likely to engage in pedophilia, one has to ask these conservative men: why are you going around exercising rights and such? Don’t you think that is dangerous?
Well, the social science research is overwhelming and convincing on this point: there is no evidence that gay men are more likely to engage in pedophilia than straight men. In fact, the evidence suggests gay men are less likely to engage in pedophilia than straight men (Source).
It isn’t that the conservative assertion that gay men are more likely to engage in pedophilia is never discussed in college classrooms that bothers conservatives. Rather, conservatives think the topic should be discussed “evenhandedly.” In other words, college instructors should pretend that the evidence is unclear and that conservatives may have a point here.
For the conservative intellectial relativists and their supporters like Nicholas Kristof, serious peer reviewed research that spans decades from Groth and Birnbaum in 1978 to research done on behalf of the FBI in the 1990s to studies of gay male arousal patterns relative to straight male arousal patterns should be counter-weighted by the sleight-of-hand shenanigans of the discredited Paul Camerons of the world.
And that attitude that “both sides” have a point on every matter is an attitude that permeates our media culture particularly as it pertains to social minorities (African-Americans, hispanics, LGBT persons, and women are the biggest targets). In the last few decades you would be hard-pressed to learn the truth by reading newspapers.
That’s because conservatives convinced journalists to cover the news emphasizing “balance” and “evenhandedness” rather than truth. The result is the confusing maze of he-said/she-said journalism that has resisted the notion of facts any time the facts favored one side or the other (usually the facts favor liberals). This is how Trump got elected. No one could decipher facts within news articles, so politicians like Trump could, pretty much lie without consequences.
It is in this atmosphere that the Atlantic ignored Kevin Williamson’s awful and inhumane views of how women should be treated in our society. In our media culture, it is always ok to challenge the validity of women’s humanity and women’s autonomy. Saying a woman does not have a right to control her own body is seen as “just a matter of opinion.” It’s not a big leap from there to hiring, for a prestigious post at a periodical like the Atlantic, a man who believes women should be hung for abortion.
At a time when the center left like Nicholas Kristof is bemoaning liberal “intolerance” of conservative ideas (let’s be clear, in the vast majority of cases we are talking about false ideas) and prattling on about intellectual diversity — a space in which wrong and immoral ideas are given the same regard as correct and moral ideas — one can see how the Atlantic hoodwinked itself into making such a catastrophic appointment.
So, after Williamson can we please lay off the “intellectual diversity” nonsense? That goes for both media and academia. The world is round. Gay men aren’t peculiarly dangerous to children, and it is NOT acceptable to advocate that women be hung for having abortions.
We should no more expect sociologist instructors to give equal weight to superstitions about gay men and children than we would expect archeology instructors to give equal weight to the notion that ancient aliens built the Pyramids. Giving equal weight to phony ideas does nothing to further the mission of the academy to educate its students. In fact, “intellectual diversity” contradicts its educational mission.