Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about how the Perennially Offended on campus have made it so it’s increasingly difficult to do anything without transgressing at least one of their network of -ism tripwires. “Monday we heard that Phi Beta Kappa had denied membership to George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., because the school disinvited filmmaker Michael Moore as a speaker last fall (saving taxpayers a fat $35,000 speaker’s fee),” the WSJ wrote. “On the flip side of the academic-freedom barricades, Harvard President Larry Summers remained in the hot seat for remarks he made in January about possible disparities in scientific aptitude between men and women.”
Then the Journal went on to discuss the latest “outrage.” Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, on campus at Harvard to receive an award, gave an optimistic speech to women, telling them they “could have it all.” That included a husband, however, which was shrieked at as “heteronormative.”
As if on cue, there’s this letter in The Daily Tar Heel today. I pass it along as written, for nothing needs to be added:
I am writing in response to Joseph Schwartz?s article in Wednesday?s paper, which I found to be carelessly inconsiderate. Thomas Stockwell was introduced in the article with the explicit qualifier that he was “the victim of the attack.” It is my personal stance that in situations involving hate crimes or other attacks on one’s identity, it is thoughtless to refer to the injured party as a “victim” because the word itself conveys a notion of powerlessness. …
