On one level, arguments about free speech on secular college and university campuses are “secular” arguments.
However, if you know anything about the First Amendment wars in recent decades you know that topics linked to religion — especially when they involve the Sexual Revolution — are frequently in the mix. Things also get dicey when religious believers start talking about salvation, heaven, hell, etc.
Someone like Mark Hemingway totally gets that. As a former GetReligionista, Mark (click here for obligatory 30 Rock nod to Hemingway) knows the landscape of media coverage in the battlefield where fights about religious liberty and free speech frequently overlap.
This brings me to a RealClearInvestigations.com piece that he wrote recently that ran with this headline: “A Push in States to Fight Campus Intolerance With 'Intellectual Diversity' Laws.” Here is a key passage:
In March of last year, President Trump issued an executive order making federal research funding contingent on universities having adequate free speech protections. At the state level, Texas last year became the 17th state since 2015 to enact legislation protecting First Amendment rights on campus. Currently, the conservative National Association of Scholars is working with four states – Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Arizona – to go further: pass laws to increase “intellectual diversity” at public universities.
South Dakota has already done so, and the law’s requirements amount to the most sweeping campus reforms in the country. It was triggered last year by a minor controversy over the stifling of a planned “Hawaiian Day” on one campus -- a last straw for critics of cultural hypersensitivity, which revived intellectual diversity legislation opposed by the state Board of Regents.
Under intellectual diversity laws, not only must dissenting views be tolerated, but college administrations are required to actively take steps (yet to be specified) to ensure that students are exposed to competing cultural and political viewpoints.
So what would “competing cultural” viewpoints look like in campus debates about gender, sex and marriage? Is it more accurate to say that there are “Republican” beliefs involved there doctrines linked to traditional forms of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.?
It was on Twitter that I saw Hemingway connect some dots in ways that I thought would be of interest to religion-beat writers and religion-news readers. For example:
Hemingway is referring, of course, to discussions of the Bob Jones vs. United States case in which this fundamentalist school — it has long embraced that label — lost its tax-exempt status because of its teachings (at that time) on interracial dating.
If SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) now have the same status as race in some corners of American law (hello Justice Neil Gorsuch), could it become risky to defend traditional religious doctrines on gender, sex and marriage? If the government can question “diversity” issues on one side of that debate, maybe questions could be asked about the words and viewpoints of people on the other side?
So back to Hemingway on Twitter:
What Mark is thinking about is “diversity” in terms of religious, moral and cultural points of view, as well as “political” viewpoints.
Most research focuses — #SURPRISE — on political labels. See this blast of data from the Pew Research Center team. Here’s the question that I always ask: Yes, there are very few Republicans on elite university faculties. Hey, how many of the GOP folks are actual libertarians, when it comes to moral and social issues? Are the numbers even more skewed when religion and culture is taken into account?
Back to Hemingway:
So, does anyone have anything positive to say on any of these issues?
In recent years, two prominent Christian voices — liberal Cornel West and conservative Robert George — have developed a kind of road-show forum in which they talk about what needs to happen for some kind of openness and trust to return to discussions of these topics.
Here is an appearance not that long ago at Baylor University. The key is that they embrace free speech and believe that these discussions need to involve respect and even friendship, instead of verbal violence and threats of government involvement.
Reporters might want to look for future events involving these two, even in the current Zoom era.
