Rather neat trick: simultaneously assuming stances of shrinking violet and goose-stepping jackboot

The Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board thought they had pulled it off with a recommendation that classes studying Ovid's Metamorphosis issue trigger warnings for the rape scenes.

You see, an author writing at the time of Christ and Caesar should have had the sensitivity to see that he 'd be "marginalizing student identities."

But maybe there's a greater reserve of sanity in this world than the barrage of nonsense might have us believe.  There were some great comments underneath the the Board's op-ed in the Columbia Spectator:

And this comment obviously intended to melt the precious little snowflakes:

Gullah posted on May 1, 4:15pm

Oh Precious! Precious? My precious little snowflake, speaking as a black man who has been around the block more than a few times, all of you need to grow up and get over it. You’re not the center of the universe, none of us has a right to not be offended in a democracy and if you can’t handle it repair to your padded room with your lollipops, Valium and whatever other pacifier makes you happy or better still make an appointment with a shrink. We are all always going to be offended by something. Using ‘feeling safe’, ‘respect’, and ’trigger-warnings’ are just treads in a rope to lynch free speech.

And this one:

Alum cc’12 posted on May 2, 10:01am

Wow — I could not disagree more with this article and everything it stands for and suggests and demands. Life doesn’t come with built in trigger warnings, and great literature channels life’s complexity, including its distasteful aspects, and even its horror. If your professor refused to entertain your comments about the disturbing sexual ethic of Metamorphoses because she was so swept up with its imagery, then she’s not doing her job as a facilitator and you have a valid complaint. But it seems to me that you find the entire idea of reading Ovid or other ‘canonical’ texts distasteful, and are offended by the very concept of a western canon.

Well, you can have that view. But just in case no one has told you this yet: it’s simplistic, it’s myopic, and it’s intellectually lazy. The cultures that produced most of the texts we read in lit hum dont share your cultural sensibilities. In fact, their values systems are foreign to the extreme.

Sometimes we focus too much on universalizing, but putting yourself into the mind of an Ancient Greek or a medieval European monk might as well be entering the brain of an alien. Old white men? Try explaining that concept to Vergil or Augustine or whoever — your method of filtering your experience through lenses of privilege and marginalization would seem as kooky to them as Aquinas and his hierarchies of divine law and creation probably seemed to you (if you did the reading). Sifting through All this is the thought exercise the core, at its best, is supposed to structure.

I think it’s great to suggest texts that are nuanced and sophisticated enough to add to the core, and to represent alternative viewpoints. But the underlying idea that classic texts can do violence in the classroom simply because of their content, and that the instructor’s job is thus to shelter rather than expose? That’s some pretty twisted dystopian thinking right there.

There is no right not to be offended.  It's one of those things, like a job or health care or clean air, which it's definitionally impossible to categorize as a right.


Now, there have been those over the past few decades who tried to establish some kind of framework of censorship on the part of Christians for their vocal outrage at such works of "art" as Serrano's Piss Christ, but those oranges don't mix with those apples.   Christians understood that they'd have to live in a world where their faith was subjected to infantile insults.  Their completely legitimate objection was to federal subsidization of such expression.

Which, speaking of keeping distinctions clear, is why Pam Gellar was not just indulging in juvenile taunting.  She was making a point that is crucial at this juncture in our imperiled civilization:

I didn’t like “Piss Christ,” and I don’t like insulting drawings of Mohammed. If Geller wanted an NEA grant to dunk Mohammed in beautifully illuminated urine, I would disagree quite strongly. But that’s not what she’s doing. She’s contending that in America, people are allowed to say offensive things without risking execution. I am at a loss as to why anyone would disagree with that. But I am utterly baffled how people who think it’s censorship to withdraw funding for anti-Christian “hate speech” can argue that private individuals have no right to express anti-Muslim views.

Which gets us back to the phenomenon of campus jackboots coming down with the vapors over one of the great canonical works of Western literature.  It's imperative for those who understand what is and is not a right to make that distinction whenever the forces of darkness would have it obscured.