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 ultural
bias in the academy and mainstream media is one of my favorite topics.
But no matter how many times I write about it, I feel as though
I never get it quite right. There’s always an impulse to find that
smoking gun — that instance of bias so egregious that it sweeps
aside the usual attempts at denial and obfuscation by the leftist
powers that be. Such smoking guns exist. Yet the operation of leftist
bias in our governing cultural institutions is typically a more
subtle affair. You find it in debates that really aren’t debates
— passionate disputes about, say, whether the most constructive
resources for feminist thought are to be found in Marxism or in
postmodernism. For a socially moderate or conservative American,
it’s the Alice-in-wonderland quality of listening to these pseudo-debates
on the left — in even mainstream cultural organs — that
brings home the message that seemingly more conventional cultural
ideas are now considered beyond the pale.
I had that
Alice-in-wonderland experience last Saturday while reading an article
in the New York Times about Kenji Yoshino, an activist gay
law professor at Yale. The article, by Kristin Eliasberg, was headlined,
“Making a Case For the Right to Be Different.” Professor Yoshino,
it turns out, was one of the inspirations for Justice John Paul
Stevens’s dissent in last year’s Supreme Court decision affirming
the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals from positions
of leadership in their organization.
Professor
Yoshino, whose work is influenced by queer theory and postmodernism,
is looking to expand the meaning of constitutionally forbidden discrimination.
Instead of prohibiting discrimination against “immutable traits,”
like skin color, Yoshino want to read the Constitution as prohibiting
discrimination based on anything that could be interpreted as a
sign of a person’s social identity — their language, their
hair-style, their personality, or their sexual orientation. In effect,
Yoshino wants to use the Constitution to force people to “recognize
and respect” attitudes and forms of behavior of which they disapprove.
Of course,
while purporting to be based on a liberal respect for rights, Yoshino’s
views fly in the face of our most cherished traditions of freedom.
The right of free association, and the distinction between tolerance
of those with different views and state-enforced approval of those
with such views would all be cast aside if Yoshino’s ideas take
hold. That certainly doesn’t mean Yoshino’s work isn’t worth writing
about. It does mean that the least one might expect from our newspaper
of record is some actual consultation with Yoshino’s critics.
Instead what
the Times gives us is a series of quotes from friends, colleagues,
and supporters of Yoshino. Those comments create the appearance
of a debate, without actually allowing one to take place. Instead
of finding a conservative legal scholar who might clearly and energetically
explain the dangerous and controversial implications of Yoshino’s
views, we get sympathizers who sorrowfully point out that the “lack
of constitutional grounding” for Yoshino’s theories might be a bit
of a “hurdle” for the poor professor. “I have a lot of respect for
Yoshino’s work, but I think he tends to overestimate what judges
will accept.” That’s the worst that is said of Yoshino. Maybe to
the editors at the Times, that sounds like a debate. But
to anyone who isn’t already on the cultural left, this article sounds
like a bunch of radicals sitting around a table arguing about how
to bamboozle a few judges into “subverting” the Constitution. And
in fact the only time a conservative shows up in this article is
in an anecdote supposedly illustrating how benighted judges who
aren’t already sympathizers of queer theorists can be.
This inconspicuous
article in the Times may convey as much about the day-to-day
operation of bias in our newspapers and universities as the brouhaha
over the ads by David Horowitz and the Independent Women’s Forum.
A bunch of leftists ragging on conservatives and commiserating about
how difficult it’s going to be to twist the Constitution into a
shape that will accomplish their cultural ends--that is what goes
on in much of the academy today. In that sense at least, the Times
has covered the story with perfect accuracy."
Is there a
solution? Sure. The Times could solve the problem easily
enough, simply by bringing on some conservative reporters. Any reporter
for a national paper of record like the Times ought to strive
for balanced coverage. But reporters of different political and
cultural dispositions will inevitably frame their stories, and interpret
the imperative to be balanced, in different ways. That means that
in addition to an ethic of fair representation of viewpoints within
a story, we need to have a variety of reporters coming at stories
from different perspectives. For a national daily newspaper, we
need, not the pseudo-diversity of multiple leftist ethnicities,
but a collection of reporters that reflects the range of political
at cultural attitudes at play in our national debates.
Don’t hold
your breath. Genuine diversity in the newsroom is something we will
never get from the current management of the New York Times.
In earlier columns I’ve looked at bias in the Times’s
treatment of feminism and
race. On issues of homosexuality, the outcome is no different.
When it comes to the controversial cultural issues of our day, debate
at the New York Times is a one-way street.
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