Shut up, they explain II
More details emerge from Stanford
“We hope your daughters get raped!” —a protester at Stanford University, according to U.S. Circuit of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan
With Peggy Noonan off this weekend, The Wall Street Journal handed over her space opposite the editorial page to Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District. He was the judge who attempted to give a speech at Stanford University— where he was invited to speak—but was shouted down by students protesting his presence, maybe his existence.
The column was maybe the best piece of opinion writing in the nation last week (since apparently Bret Stephens, as well as Peggy Noonan, took the week off).
So why would college students protest the interesting-only-to-a-lawprofessor “discourse on how circuit courts interact with the Supreme Court in these times of doctrinal flux”?
According to the judge: “While in practice, I represented clients and advanced arguments the protesters hate—for instance, I defended Louisiana’s traditional marriage laws.” (Editorial comment: You mean the kind of laws that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all supported until about halfway through President Obama’s tenure?)
“As for my judicial decisions, among the several hundred I’ve written, the protesters were especially vexed by U.S. v. Varner. A federal prisoner serving a term for attempted receipt of child pornography (and with a previous state conviction for possession of child porn) petitioned our court to order that he be called by feminine pronouns. As my opinion explained, federal courts can’t control what pronouns people use.”
But that was enough that his daughters should be raped, according to what he heard.
These protesters are law students. Not that their insults to a guest at their school should be tolerated if they’d been students of another major. But it is especially worrisome that they are law students. That is, they should be in a school that teaches how to listen to opposing views—if for no other reason than to be able to oppose with more vigor and intelligence—and how to argue with civility. A judge in the United States isn’t going to stand for lawyers in his or her court barking at each other and wishing harm on the opposing legal counsel’s offspring. You don’t have to be polite in court, but you must have manners. (“Such a man is not to be mistaken for one who shirks the hard knocks of life. On the contrary, he is frequently an eager gladiator, vastly enjoying opposition. But when he fights he fights in the manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, not in that of a longshoreman cleaning out a waterfront saloon. That is to say, he carefully guards his amour propre by assuming that his opponent is as decent a man as he is, and just as honest, and perhaps, after all, right.”—H.L. Mencken, who knew how to debate.)
The whole episode was videoed, or what amounts to video with phones these days, but the judge decided not to give his rip-roaring Doctrinal Flux speech. Not after an administrator of some sort spent 10 minutes dressing him down for his sins.
He told the press they wanted him to make a hostage video, and he was having none of it.
About that administrator who dressed him down … . Apparently she’s an associate dean of DEI: diversity, equity and inclusion. In an accompanying editorial the day of the judge’s op-ed, The Journal noted that colleges all across the nation, not just elite ones, are stacked with DEI apparatchiks. The edit quotes Heritage Foundation numbers: The average major university has 45 DEI people on the payroll. The University of Michigan has 163 DEI officers. Ohio State has 94. Even Georgia Tech has 41 (but only 13 history profs).
Is it any wonder that so many Americans look down on higher education? Especially at those schools that are thought of as “elite.” The typical person out here in flyover land would look at the video of the kids screaming at the judge—and watching other kids walk out before he could get a word in—and think several things: First, these kids weren’t raised right. Second, what is going on in schools of laws these days? Third, no way am I sending my kids there.
And maybe a fourth thought:
These DEI types. They seem very concerned with diversity in skin tone, gender, gender identification, sexual preferences, class, income level and religion as long as it’s not the majority religion in the United States.
But diversity of thought? Not so much.