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A Boise State University tenured professor is under siege after publishing a researched article with the Heritage Foundation about feminism and the transgender movement.
In his article, the professor explained the similarities between the feminist movement which began some years ago and the current transgender movement---And how both movements work toward the same end.
Boom!
Forget free speech. Away with him.
Professor Scott Yenor has been under siege on campus and in local media after he published articles with the Heritage Foundation and the Heritage affiliated Daily Signal.
In August he wrote in the Daily Signal, "Transgender rights activists are seeking to abridge parental rights by elevating the independent choices of young children. Respecting the sexual and gender 'choices' of ever-younger children erodes parental rights and compromises the integrity of the family as an independent unit."
This article was taken from an in-depth, well-sourced academic paper written earlier for the Heritage Foundation.
Students, activists and even some staff members at Boise State are waging war against Dr. Yenor, and have now launched a petition campaign to get him fired.
According to the College Fix, Boise State administration has said they will not fire him, even though the petition has thousands of signatures and is growing.
Yenor says the real blowback came when the University School of Public Service posted his article on its Facebook page. I suspect the students and activists who have a problem with Yenor are not regular readers of the Heritage Foundation or the Daily Signal.
While I'm not sure of the real motive for publishing the article on Facebook--- the school said it was in the interest of free speech while clarifying they did not endorse what the professor had written--- the reaction was immediate, negative and angry---especially from LGBTQ students and their allies on the faculty.
The new student diversity and inclusion instructor Francisco Salinas jumped on the issue and began publicly linking Yenor to events in Charlottesville and to Nazism.
This incident is in one way local--- in Idaho, but also very, very typical of what happens when a student leader or professor holds a different view than that of the homosexual, far Left progressive movement.
Dr. Yenor says, "There has been a very chilling effect on not only my speech, but those who would speak in defense of me both on the substance, and on the principle of academic freedom."
Boise State political science Professor Lynn Lubamersky says she believes in free expression, but what Yenor said in his article "violated clear policies that govern our institution, our statement of shared values, and State Board of Education policy regarding academic freedom, and most important, our concern for our students."
She said, "When someone expresses bigoted, homophobic, and misogynistic views as a representative of the university, I think that we have the right and responsibility to at least make a statement that we do not share these values and they are not represented {sic} of our university."
Lubamersky also says, "The majority of our university is made up of women and transgendered people."
If true, that is shocking---Boise State University is "mostly" women and transgenders?
Joe Goode, a member of the Boise State Young Democrats, told KTVB TV, "In our belief, this is hate speech, and it's alienating a lot of folks in this Boise State community. We want to show that our university stands for more than hate, we are a community of equality and inclusivity."
Yenor says the personal attacks don't bother him, but he worries about the long term impact on people with divergent views.
This episode at Boise State mirrors a deeper and broader problem in our national public education.
Those so-called progressives who were the champions of "free speech" are now on attack toward everyone and every view that does not align with their own.
Yenor says there's a feeling of a mob being on campus, "and you don't cross a mob."
He says what he sees is the "development of a culture of victimization on campus."
This is a prime example of how public education is self-destructing before our eyes. The inmates are running the institution. Those tasked with teaching the students, (and funded with taxpayer money), become facilitators of what the "students" want to "teach" everyone else.
And they become Lenin's proverbial "usual idiots" to the galloping secular progressive movement, intent on destroying our institutions and remaking the family, the country, the culture and our institutions.
Dr. Yenor concludes his academic in-depth article with this:
There exists no better way of extending the sexual revolution that second-wave feminists imagined than by shaking confidence in the very idea of man and woman. Transgender theories are thus a late iteration of the feminist goal of a sexual revolution that includes abolition of male supremacy and traditional socialization toward gender scripts, cultivation of androgyny, elimination of the proprietary family and the dependence of women and children on that family, and celebration of non-monogamous, non-marital sexual experiences. Being one gender or another is a matter of human imagination, and new types of genders can be imagined: These experiences are in keeping with the rolling sexual revolution.
Transgender rights therefore extend the philosophical premises of second-wave feminism and foster its political project while pointing to a world that is not exactly what those feminists thought was needed in their time. Whether this new world will prove to be fit for human flourishing remains to be seen.
Paul defined our times by describing his own times---and answers the question as to where this all leads in 2 Timothy 3:7-9:
Always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.
Be Informed. Be Vigilant. Be Discerning. Be Prayerful.