Closed-Minded Campuses

May 19, 2014
 
I’m getting my affairs in order; this may be my last Point of View.

Condoleezza Rice had to cancel her flight to New Jersey when the outcry by the students at Rutgers made her commitment to speak at their commencement a bad idea. Christine Lagarde was coming to Smith College in Massachusetts for their graduation event yesterday, but 500 student signatures on a petition protesting policies of the International Monetary Fund caused her plans to change; she was replaced at the dais by Ruth Simmons, a former president of the school: a safe bet.

There is a creeping landslide underway in America, “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” (from the words of a very out-of-date song, called “The Star Spangled Banner”). Our national community has been swallowed-up by the mud called “political correctness,” and no one seems to know how to stop the mucky flow. Will there be any survivors?

David and Jason Benham are twin brothers from North Carolina who have been uninvited, as well. Both graduates of Liberty University (an affiliation that puts any graduate on a watch list), they are real estate entrepreneurs whose success through the Great Recession has captured attention. They were under contract with HGTV (“Home and Garden Television”) for a reality program called “Flip it Forward,” set to air in the Fall. The program would give under-advantaged families their dream home by transforming fixer-uppers, but the show was ditched when Right Wing Watch informed HGTV that the brothers’ “extreme right-wing views” had no place in the public square. Because they had been heard to express their Christian convictions against homosexuality, they were now persona non grata on HGTV.

I’ve met the Benham brothers; they’re great young guys, and my beliefs sing harmony to theirs. What they applaud, I applaud. What grieves them about our country grieves me, as well. I’d be proud of being compared to them and their biblical worldview.

Allan Bloom died 22 years ago, but he wrote about 2014 way back in 1987, with his haunting bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. The seismic shift was already underway then – nearly three decades ago – when he exposed the paradox of the American elite university culture as a death-to-meaningful-discourse environment. No views save the liberal left were welcomed, even then. What Bloom forecast has now become our national reality.

Case now closed: all opposition is now silenced. Views contrary to the mainstream media/top-tier academic/progressive politico ideologies are heretical and disallowed. People holding a traditional Christian worldview – founded on the Bible – are subversive radicals who are too toxic to take seriously.

I’m expecting a social media campaign against the Point of View any day now. Every time I open my mouth – or, put my digits on my keyboard – I’m likely to be expressing a view that will mobilize an outcry by someone whose personal boundaries are being challenged. Good thing I don’t maintain a Facebook presence; I would have been challenged years ago…

If you don’t hear from me next Monday, thanks for the memories. What the terrorists (can’t call them Islamic) haven’t yet accomplished – shutting down America’s foundational freedoms – is now the agenda of the powerful and privileged who are kidnapping a culture built on Judeo-Christian truth and holding it hostage in the jungle of godless closed-mindedness.

Hey, David and Jason: how about we put in a bid to buy back America and see if we can get some folks together to do a large-scale remodel before it’s condemned as a tear-down? We’d better hurry; the wrecking ball is on the freeway, heading this way. “At that time there was no king in Israel. People did whatever they felt like doing,” (Judges 21:25).

Bob Shank