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By Diogenes ( articles ) | Nov 03, 2007

Hillary Clinton visited her alma mater yesterday to let her 40-year-old feminism out for a romp in safe territory, and to soak up a little adoration in the process. This being one of the few occasions where she can relate to her audience viscerally and intuitively, we're treated to relatively spontaneous remarks, perhaps the closest we'll get to an unscripted Hillary:

Clinton began her 40-minute speech by mentioning the old rules for young women that she helped abolish at Wellesley, and of which many of today's undergraduates were unaware. Boys were allowed to visit dormitory rooms only on Sunday afternoons, and couples had to keep at least two of their four feet on the floor at all times.

"Try it sometime," she deadpanned, to big laughs.

If I had a daughter at Wellesley, I'd be miffed by Clinton's (probably inadvertent) suggestion that one afternoon a week of sexual abstinence would be a new experience for her ("Try it sometime"). But Hillary correctly understands the importance to her core supporters of unfettered sexual liberty. The Leftist view of emancipated female sexuality is, by an irony of history, largely congruent with the view of women the same Leftists attribute to the misogynist redneck of popular imagination. What for the misogynist is an occasion of gloating disparagement, however, is for the feminist an occasion for celebration. As Elizabeth Anscombe saw, this points to a large chasm that divides progressivist thought from Christianity full-stop: "Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be." Hillary's pleasantry about the by-gone dorm days is a signal that -- regardless of the verbal compromises political expedience may require in the months to come -- her heart is with those who've said their definitive good-bye to Christianity.

During the same Wellesley address Clinton made repeated reference to her sex with regard to her presidential aspirations: "We're ready to shatter that highest glass ceiling," she said. Here too we find that the feminist adjuration that a woman be judged in virtue of her character instead of her gender has been stood on its head. The red meat tossed out to the frenzied students (who "screamed at top volume, stomped their feet, and danced in the aisles," according to the Globe story) was precisely the permission to wallow emotionally in the prospect of a female president. Here too it's uncanny how much the discarded biologism of the Right -- e.g., Nazi racial theory -- resembles the avant garde biologism of the Left: what matters, deep down, is that thrum in the blood.

How we've grown.