coyotes and culture wars

By Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J. ( articles ) | May 26, 2003

News item:

Freshman students this fall at Wesleyan University in Connecticut will have the option of living in a new "gender-blind" facility -- one floor of a dorm accommodating up to 12 students, the Hartford Courant reported. The living space is reserved for students who don't want to be categorized as one gender or another, the university said. The school's new policy says the students in the living area "will be assigned a roommate without the consideration of gender." Selina Ellis, a student who campaigned for the new housing, was surprised by the administration's response, the Courant said. "We figured that this would be too much for them to handle, but they were really eager to understand and meet the needs of transgender students on campus," she said.

The "long march through the institutions" -- by which the New Left put aside revolutionary violence and tapewormed itself into positions of influence in government, communications, and education -- has had its most stunning successes in the universities. As Miss Ellis testifies above, radicals prepared to batter down the gates of the citadel find the door opened to them from the inside. Viewed from within the history of socialism, it's interesting that the targets of subversion are no longer top-hatted capitalists but families, and the sexual morality constitutive of the family, a point deftly made by Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard (9-7-1998):

[After 1968] The Left split into a "socialist" political wing and a "Woodstock" lifestyle wing. As in cartoons where the coyote saws off the roadrunner's branch and it is the tree that falls, the Woodstock limb survived and the socialist tree collapsed. It was the newfangled and faddish-looking political tendency that proved enduring. Compare the legacy of the Beatles with the legacy of the Industrial Areas Foundation. Compare the legacy of birth-control liberalization with the legacy of SDS's economic position papers.