It’s amazing how many of the academy’s bad ideas leak out out from campus and begin to infect the body politic. Two of academia’s worst are the use of ideological litmus tests to determine whether a person can pursue their chosen profession and the explicit comparison of orthodox Judeo-Christian theology to violent white supremacy. Yesterday, both ideas were on very public display on opposite ends of the country.
First, Massachusetts senate candidate Martha Coakley declares that Catholics need not apply for some medical jobs. K-Lo has the story:
During an interview [yesterday], Martha Coakley was asked about the conscience issue Catholic medical personnel encounter when it comes to a law that mandates the distribution of emergency contraception, which sometimes works as an abortifacient. (I wrote about the details of this issue as pertain to Scott Brown and Massachusetts and Martha Coakley’s misrepresentation of all of this here.)
Coakley explained that this should not be a problem because “we have a separation of church and state.” “Let’s be clear,” the attorney general added.
The radio host, Ken Pittman, pointed out that complex legal principle that “In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom.”
Coakley agrees that “The law says that people are allowed to have that.” But, making clear her view — the attorney general who wants to be the next senator from Massachusetts — she declared that “You can have religious freedom, but you probably shouldn’t work in an emergency room.” (Listen here.)
But that wasn’t all. Over in California, during day four of the Prop 8 trial, Yale history professor George Chauncey compared the motivations of those who support marriage with the motivations of segregationists and declared that the official doctrinal statements of the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches reflect historic bias.
It is foolish for anyone to think that campus outrages are just sideshows, mere minor irritations caused by “those crazy professors” or “silly campus activists.” In reality, our universities act as essentially the think tanks for the Left, the laboratory for their ideas about life, liberty, and the nature of our country. The arguments in today’s sit-in are the talking points in tomorrow’s Senate race, and your university student handbook is essentially the galley copy for the next decade’s statute books.