The Silencing (17 page)

The experience was painfully eye opening for Warren. “I was so surprised. [I]’ve never voted Republican. I’m not your stereotypical right-wing Christian,” she said. While Warren described herself as “orthodox and evangelical” she was decidedly not fundamentalist, and yet that is how the university seemed to view her. “I had a lot of sorrow about the culture wars and the way Christians engaged in those,” Warren said. “But I think I had an assumption that all the cultural warriors and all the fundamentalists were on the right. I realized through this process that they are on both sides.” The difference of course is that Vanderbilt, like most secular universities, present themselves to the world as Enlightenment-bound, open-minded thinkers.

“Vanderbilt thinks they are operating out of a non-belief system but they are operating out of a belief system, and it’s essentially [a kind of] progressive liberal theism . . . They repeatedly said how much they value religious groups on campus, but I think it’s a certain kind of religious group. [They] want religious groups that are not orthodox in views of homosexuality,” Warren told me. “Just come out and say it, put it in the flyer and let students know what they’re getting into before they choose Vanderbilt . . . If [Vanderbilt] wants to be the Bob Jones or Liberty University of the Left, that’s fine. The difference is that Bob Jones and Liberty are very honest about their preset positions and are very honest about who
they are. [Vanderbilt should] say ‘we don’t like orthodox evangelical religious belief across the board.’ Don’t say, ‘we love religious groups’ and then gut our ability to self govern and practice in a meaningful way.”

Warren’s lament echoed that of the late Reverend Peter Gomes, the celebrated Harvard Divinity School theologian and Minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, who blasted the editors of the
Harvard Crimson
when they argued in 2003
⁴⁸
that the Harvard Radcliffe Christian Fellowship (HRCF) should have been denied university recognition because of its “requirement that leadership believe in the holy spirit and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The editors alleged it violated Harvard’s anti-discrimination policy. Gomes characterized this view as “foolish” and wrote that it “boggles the mind.” Interestingly, Vanderbilt selected Gomes’s book,
The Good Life
as required reading for Vanderbilt’s freshman class of 2015 as part of an effort to teach them about ethics.
⁴⁹
Perhaps they should make his scathing letter to the editor required reading as well.

In that letter, Gomes—himself a gay celibate man and also a vocal advocate for gays and lesbians
⁵⁰
in the church—argued that opposing religious groups’ right to discriminate based on doctrinal beliefs betrayed a “fundamental ignorance of the nature of religious belief, or a determination in the name of ‘non-discrimination’ to discriminate against a Christian student group which takes its Christian identity and principles seriously.”
⁵¹
He explained what should have been obvious: “It does make an enormous difference to the integrity of a Christian club in the evangelical tradition if its leaders are unwilling to subscribe to the orthodox Christian beliefs to which the club is committed.” He asked: “How can a profession of faith be irrelevant in the leadership of a faith-based group?” Gomes’s frustration with the
Crimson
’s intolerant editorial was palpable throughout the letter, even though he himself did not embrace the orthodox view that homosexuality is a sin.
⁵²

He called the
Crimson
’s argument “not tolerant, neither is it pluralistic, nor inclusive. Let us call it what it is: hostile, rampantly secular, and overtly anti-Christian.” He noted, “If there is any discrimination going on
in this debate, it is the unseemly discrimination of
The Crimson
against an explicitly Christian student group, and the particulars of the faith which provides the basis of its identity.”

Replace the
Crimson
with the names of a host of universities and colleges and all of the arguments are just as true today. The people who purport to believe in tolerance, diversity, and free speech in fact act like intolerant fundamentalists projecting their own narrow-mindedness onto Christian groups who merely want to be left alone to practice their faith and serve their campus communities.

TOLERANCE FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

While the illiberal left expects to be shielded from views they don’t want to encounter, conservatives have to sit through classes with liberal professors in order to obtain a diploma. It’s “hate speech” to hold an anti-abortion protest, but you can say pretty much whatever you want to a conservative without worrying about the long arm of campus justice coming down on you. Omar Mahmood, the Muslim student at the University of Michigan who wrote the satirical essay ridiculing political correctness that got him booted from the student newspaper, had his apartment vandalized after the column ran.
⁵³
Mahmood told the
College Fix
that he considers himself a political conservative and holds views at odds with most other Muslims on campus. This can’t be tolerated. According to the
College Fix
, “the vandalism posted on [his] apartment door stated ‘you scum embarrass us,’ ‘you self-righteous d-ck,’ ‘you have no soul,’ ‘everyone hates you you violent pr-ck.” There was also an image of the devil, and hot dogs and eggs had been thrown at his door.

If you are a conservative—or even a liberal who says something deemed conservative—your speech will get canceled or your award revoked for taking a view at odds with liberal dogma. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s honorary degree at Brandeis was yanked for slamming Islam, but nobody blinked when at a 2007 Smith Commencement address, Gloria Steinem
compared people who oppose abortion and same-sex marriage to “Germany under fascism.”
⁵⁴
Moreover, there’s no “trigger warning” for conservative students who are regularly confronted with ideological and philosophical views they find offensive or may even violate their religious beliefs. Nor have conservative students demanded them. It seems that what most non-left students desire is the simple right to determine their own views and express them freely without fear of retribution. This reasonable desire is a bridge too far for the illiberal left.

SIX

THE WAR ON FOX NEWS

              
[Presidents] inherit traditions that make us greater than the challenges we face. And one of those traditions is . . . a free press that isn’t afraid to ask questions, to examine and to criticize.
¹

              
—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, APRIL 2012

S
peaking at his first White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2009, the new president of the United States opened with a joke to the assembled media: “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table. (Laughter.)”
²

The president’s light-hearted barb at Fox News was harmless on its face and if it had been left at just a little tension between a White House and a news organization, that would have been typical. Instead, it was a precursor to something much more ominous: a war on dissent by the White House, starting with that outlier of the media, Fox News.

The president’s joke evoked laughter because it hit on an underlying truth: the media had been mostly in the tank for Obama during his historic campaign for the White House, and had ushered the first African American president into Washington with glowing and fawning coverage. But as compliant as the media corps had been, it wouldn’t be enough for
President Obama or his White House. Instead, the president elected on a promise of unprecedented transparency would go down as one of the least transparent in history, drawing unflattering comparisons to President Richard Nixon. The media would ultimately grow frustrated and angry by their lack of access and the strong-arm tactics of Hope and Change, Inc.

The White House’s obsession with delegitimizing Fox News was the canary in the coal mine. A mere seven months into his first term, President Obama complained to CNBC’s John Harwood: “I’ve got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration. . . . You’d be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.”
³
Imagine for a moment that you were a Republican president, and you only had “one television station” attacking your administration. You’d be breaking out the champagne, not complaining about it.

Republicans accept as a well-documented fact of life that an overwhelming majority of the media is slanted against them.
⁴
They take critical media coverage for granted. The Obama administration does not. So much so that harsh criticism by a news outlet is viewed as intolerable dissent. Moreover, this broadside from the president of the United States was not buttressed by facts. Pew Research Center found that from September 8 through October 16 of the 2008 campaign—the heat of the election cycle—40 percent of Fox News stories on then-Senator Obama were negative as were 40 percent of the network’s stories on Senator John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent. You can’t get more fair and balanced than that. If you wanted to see bias against a candidate, CNN and MSNBC were better examples. Pew found that 61 percent of CNN’s stories on John McCain were negative, compared to only 39 percent of their Obama stories. The disparity was even greater at MSNBC where a mere 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories (and only 10 percent of MSNBC’s coverage of McCain was rated as positive). Overall, according to an October 2007 study of media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (funded
by Pew) in collaboration with Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, the press gave much more favorable coverage to Democratic candidates, noting, for example, that 46.7 percent of stories about Barack Obama had a positive tone, while only 12.4 percent of stories about John McCain did.
⁵
Obama should have been counting his blessings, not complaining about the one news television outlet that wouldn’t fall in line. He had received, by some measures, the most laudatory press coverage of any senatorial or presidential candidate in recent history.
⁶

It seemed that President Obama had come to expect nothing but media praise and ruled all criticism illegitimate. A few months after the president’s interview with Harwood, the White House made an unprecedented effort to delegitimize a major news network. “What I think is fair to say about Fox—and certainly it’s the way we view it—is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN on October 11, 2009. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”
⁷
Dunn offered little evidence for what she said—nor did she apparently see any irony in a liberal administration, which should believe in freedom of the press, telling the American people which media outlets had government approval and which did not.

Evidence was not needed, of course, because it has long been a trope of the illiberal left that Fox News is a “right-wing mouthpiece,” “isn’t a legitimate news channel,”
⁸
and “should be treated as a right-wing misinformation network, not legitimized as a neutral source of news.”
⁹
as
MoveOn.org
charged in 2007.
¹⁰
In 2007, left-wing blogger Matt Stoller penned an op-ed in
Politico
titled “Republican Propaganda Is Not News.” He alleged that Fox News might be “controlled by the Republican Party itself” and warned against treating it as a “legitimate news channel.”
¹¹

In September 2009, the White House had fired a warning shot, cutting veteran reporter and
Fox News Sunday
anchor Chris Wallace out of a round of interviews with the president on healthcare reform. White House Communications
Director Anita Dunn conceded that CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS were included, but Fox was excluded because the administration did not like the way Fox covered the administration.
¹²
Deputy White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer explained the snub to the
New York Times
: “We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization.”
¹³

Though some media outlets chortled at Obama’s denunciation of a rival, others, to their credit, saw that something wasn’t quite right.
Time
magazine’s Michael Scherer, for instance, noted that the administration’s “take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President’s vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration’s critics, including a recent post that announced ‘Fox lies’ and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama’s 2016 Olympics effort.”
¹⁴

New York Times
media reporter Brian Stelter followed up on October 11, 2009, stating that “Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.”
¹⁵