I very much respect Stuart Taylor’s judgment, including on the occasions in which we are in disagreement. In his current—and, alas, second-to-last—National Journal column (temporarily available here), Taylor offers much softer criticism than I have of Elena Kagan’s actions against military recruiters at Harvard law school.

First, let me highlight the areas of agreement between Taylor and me: Taylor regards Kagan’s exclusion of military recruiters from the law school’s jobs office as an “unwise way to protest” Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He “fault[s] Kagan for aiming her denunciations at what she (among many others) has over and over again called ‘the military’s’ discriminatory recruitment policy” when in fact “the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy was set by Clinton’s implementation of the 1993 law that he signed after a Democratic Congress had passed it”:

Although Congress and Clinton acted at the behest of military leaders, it was unwise for Kagan (and many others) to discriminate against military recruiters who were bound by the Clinton-signed law and policy while giving a pass to the Democratic politicians who (along with most congressional Republicans) adopted them.

And he agrees “to some extent” that “Kagan’s world is a legal academic complex oozing politically correct bias, moral vanity, detachment from the real world, and a cynical view of the law as meaning whatever you can manipulate it to mean.” But he sees Kagan as “part of the commonsense solution” to the “p.c. problem.”

Taylor says that he “largely agree[s] with Kagan’s assertion” that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is “a profound wrong” and “a moral injustice of the first order.” But he also makes clear that he agrees with me that the latter phrase is extremist, as he would “reserve ‘the first order’ for, say, mass murder.”

As I see it, the real divide between Taylor’s assessment and my own is reflected in Taylor’s dismissal of Kagan’s restrictions on military recruiting as “largely symbolic.” I take issue with this in two respects. First, symbols matter. As I’ve put it:

Kagan elevated her own ideological commitment on gay rights above what Congress, acting on the advice of military leaders, had determined best served the interests of national security. At a time of war, in the face of the grand civilizational challenge that radical Islam poses, Kagan treated military recruiters worse than she treated the high-powered law firms that were donating their expensive legal services to anti-American terrorists.

That symbolic message from a dean of one of the nation’s leading law schools isn’t trivial, and I agree with Peter Beinart, the liberal former editor of the New Republic, that it amounted to “a statement of national estrangement,” of Kagan’s “alienating [her]self from the country.”

Second, Taylor and I have different assessments of the inferior access (see point 3 here) that Kagan left to military recruiters through the student veterans association. In Taylor’s view, “However inconvenient her policy may have been for some, Kagan never sought to prevent military recruiters from using classrooms or other campus space to meet students.” That’s true. But she made it unnecessarily cumbersome for them to do so.