Thanks to a federal mandated education, our children graduate from high school unable to read or perform the simplest of math. But it doesn’t end there. Thanks to the likes of Judith Butler, professor at University of California, Berkeley, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, former English professor at Duke, and their ilk, American colleges have opened another avenue of pseudo-education though which to push a far-left agenda that destroys traditional Christian values and morals while leaving graduates with little more to show than a hefty student loan balance.
Judith Butler is best known for her books on feminism that attacks traditional values and “straights.” In addition to her activism for the homosexual agenda, Butler is an active supporter of Occupy Wall Street, on the board of the far-left socialist organization Jewish Voice for Peace, a supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah whom she once described as “social progressive movements,” and a supporter of the boycott Israel movement.
Another feminist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, helped create the field of queer studies with with Butler based on what she claimed was the hidden homoerotic subplots in books by Dickens, Henry James, etc. Sedgwick pushes ‘queer theory’ as a prism through which “scholars” can examine literary texts to break through traditional gender stereotypes. Through provocatively titled essays like “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” or “Is the Rectum Straight?” Sedgwick has managed to “project” homoerotic themes into traditional literature.
“To queer,” according to historian George Chauncey is, “to render normal sexuality as strange and unsettled, to challenge heterosexuality as a naturalized social-sexual norm and promote the notion of non-straightness.” In other words, once any distinction between the sexes is broken down, there arises a destabilizing of heterosexuality itself opening the door to critique traditional values and morals while normalizing what society once considered abnormal or perverted, advancing the idea of victimhood to infinity and beyond.
The average illegal might be a little puzzled to see his situation analyzed under the rubric of queer theory but according to Sedgwick, that confusion would only mean that he has not spent enough time in university circles where such pairings spring naturally from the all-consuming campaign to magnify victimhood and denounce the American status quo. In a talk at UCLA’s political science department entitled “Undocumented and Acting Up: Queering Sovereignty in the Immigrant Rights Movement,” queer theory was used to propose that both illegals and HIV positive homosexuals were “victims” of “simplistic accounts of individual action.” Their death and suffering, according to Cristina Beltran, is “unjustly attributed to their own actions, such as crossing the border illegally or engaging in high risk promiscuous sex. But queer theory understands that these problems are the result of global capitalism, human desire and government failure.” How is that for passing the buck?
Beltran’s talk highlighted two key aspects of today’s leftist bull passing as education. First, the concept of personal responsibility is taboo when applied to officially approved victim groups. Their sneaking across the border, breaking U.S. immigration laws was the product of forces larger than themselves. Second, the left-leaning loons passing garbage off as education is the oppositional instinct that motivates all theoretical work in the humanities and much of social science. The impetus is always to find oppression and injustice in the “state, its leaders, ideals, and institutions,” as Beltran put it. Social criticism is a legitimate academic enterprise but only as long as it rests on a solid grounding in history and fact. But today’s identity based theorizing represents a worldview and righteous self-definition that precede facts and analysis.
Queer theory suggests that no one should be stigmatized, no matter what they do. There is no such thing as responsibility and any attempt to follow the rules is oppressive.
The search for victimhood is a quasi-religious credo that motivates and gives meaning to individual action. So if you don’t believe that Western society is endemically sexist, racist, homophobic and heteronormative, you will forever find yourself at odds with campus norms.
Source: Perpetual Grievance, by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal. You can read the article in full at this link.
