A Hand Up for Freedom
It’s all right for Claremont to host a big event to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Inn raid. But that commemoration stands in stark contrast to the school’s indifference to the twentieth anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the wall separating East and West Germany was unarguably one of the most significant events of the last century, but the school has no event or speaker to discuss its implications.
That tells you a lot about priorities on the modern American college campus.
The Claremont Colleges, of which Claremont McKenna is a part, devote substantial attention to—and support of—gays. In fact, homophobic incidents have been fabricated just to make it seem that gays are under attack and therefore in need of special protection. For example, the Student Life, the newspaper of Pomona College (part of the Claremont group of colleges), reported a supposed hate crime against the Queer Resource Center, but subsequent investigation revealed the “attack” as nothing other than some drunken students dispensing a fire extinguisher nearby. And in 2003, the left-leaning newspaper the Claremont Port Side retracted a story that accused professor emeritus Harry V. Jaffa of saying that homosexuals should be shot after he threatened a lawsuit to clear his name. (Those who know Jaffa well knew that he would never say such a thing.)
Last year, following the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which recognized marriage as a relationship between a man and woman, David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, sent out an email encouraging students to join him in “expressing support for those who feel negatively affected by the passage of this measure.” Activist students disrupted dining hall lunches and dinners across campus decrying as “unacceptable” Proposition 8’s definition of marriage. Later, some even tried to disinvite Kenneth Starr, dean of Pepperdine Law School, from speaking at Pomona College because he defended Proposition 8. (The event went on anyway, and there was a tasteful protest outside.)
4 comments:
The Fall of the Berlin Wall was a massively important event, but it is an event that is over. Communism is gone. The Soviet Union is broken up, Germany is reunited.
What has not happened yet is the success of the Gay Rights Movement. Gays cannot get married and still face massive prejudice. The Ath wants too look forward and back - with Gay Rights it can do this as it strives to bring equality for all, or at least raise awareness for an ongoing cause, with these speakers.
Communism is gone?
Tell that to the N. Koreans, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Belarussians, the Moldovans, etc.
While communism in the vein of the USSR may be over, the fall of the Berlin Wall represents so much more than its collapse. Rather, it is a symbol of the struggle for freedom in general. This is an ideal that encompasses that gay rights movement and is relevant today and to everyone.
Perhaps the Fall of the Berlin Wall was underediscussed/underappreciated this past year... but you of all people should not be neglecting the capitalistic fact that the events that get talked about driven by student interest in those events. If you want there to be more talk about the Berlin Wall, then you should have hosted an event in its memory. Students on this campus are just more interested right now in striving to guarantee equal rights to a group that has been denied such rights in the past.
Post a Comment