Cheryl Abbate to Marquette: Silence Marquette Warrior

Cheryl Abbate is the Marquette Philosophy instructor who told a student who wanted to discuss gay marriage in class that any expressions of opposition would be “homophobia,” and further that any gay students who happened to be in class should be protected from hearing such arguments.

Our post generated a huge brouhaha, and eventually was the subject of an article in Inside Higher Ed.   According to the article:

Abbate, however, said she hoped Marquette would “use this event as an opportunity to create and actively enforce a policy on cyberbullying and harassment.” She added: “It is astounding to me that the university has not created some sort of policy that would prohibit this behavior which undoubtedly leads to a toxic environment for both students and faculty. I would hope that Marquette would do everything in its power to cultivate a climate where Marquette employees, especially students, are not publicly demeaned by tenured faculty.”

Thus Abbate adds “cyber bullying” to “offensive” and “harassing” and “racist, sexist and homophobic” to the repertoire of terms that politically correct academic leftists use to shut up people whose opinions they dislike.

If simply providing news coverage of an event that reflects badly on somebody is bullying, the Fox News website has been consistently bullying Barack Obama, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel doing the same to Scott Walker.

Abbate feels she has been demeaned, but was happy to demean a student by clearly implying that his views were homophobic and “offensive.” We reported that fact.  It was the facts that made Abbate look bad.

The “toxic environment” business is ironic.  Abbate created a toxic environment for the student by labeling his views on gay marriage homophobic.  There is no doubt that the “climate” feels better for politically correct students and faculty if their views and behavior are not allowed to be challenged.  In other words, when there is no diversity of opinion, or when diverse opinions are silenced.

In academia, politically correct people apparently get to attack and demean whomever they want, and then play the victim when their own behavior gets publicized.

Politically correct academics are so entirely convinced their own attitudes are righteous that they cannot accept people disagreeing with them, and even criticizing them.  It’s the result of an extremely inbred, narrow and parochial culture.

As an article on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes:

Abbate and her defenders come off in the Inside Higher Ed article as believing it’s perfectly fine for them to silence students if they hold views based on sources they don’t like.

They apparently apply that standard to professors, too.