I read with amusement a recent Chicago Tribune article about writer Salman Rushdie’s appearance at the Chicago Humanities Festival in which he “railed against censorship.” When asked about censorship, Rushdie waxed irritated about some Duke University students who chose not to read the book selected by the university for all incoming freshmen: Alison Bechdel’s comic book graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. They refused to read it because of its graphic depictions of sexuality which conflict with their religious beliefs.

It’s remarkable that the example that pops into Rushdie’s mind when asked about censorship is of conservatives choosing not to read a novel when the preponderance of censorship found within academia (and public middle and high schools) is perpetrated by “progressives” who censor conservative resources.

Rushdie pontificated that students who chose not to read Bechdel’s memoir don’t belong at elite universities:

Maybe you should just not be at Duke. Maybe you should just step down and make room for people who actually want to learn something.

Just to flesh things out a bit, Fun Home tells the true story of lesbian Bechdel’s childhood and young adulthood. She was raised by a distant, abusive, closeted (but active) homosexual father who sometimes preyed on young boys, and a distant, unaffectionate mother. Her picture book includes cartoon drawings of the author/protagonist masturbating and engaging in lesbian sex. Rushdie risibly suggests that the refusal to read this book constitutes an absence of a desire to learn.

Those who believe Bechdel’s ugly, unwise book belongs in academia, a place which  should be committed to fostering that which is good, true, and beautiful, are lost in spiritual darkness.

Rushdie has a novel understanding of “censorship.” Freely choosing not to read a text that professors—likely Leftist professors—have selected is now censorship. Censorship more commonly understood refers either to prohibiting the publication of a text or refusing to allow it to be read. Censorship is not commonly understood as the voluntary choice not to read a text. Judiciousness and free choice are recast as censorship.

Once again liberals redefine a term to serve their arrogant desire to impose their beliefs on everyone. Read whatever tripe “progressive” professors assign or they will mock you as a censor. Condescension is the last refuge of presumptuous, dogmatic, moralistic scoundrels.

Perhaps one of the reasons it’s easier in academia to find examples of texts that conservatives refuse to read than it is to find examples of texts liberal students refuse to read is that texts that liberal students would refuse to read are not chosen by professors in the first place. The real censorship occurs during the text-selection process.

If professors did choose conservative resources, they would be obliged to provide censorious trigger warnings in advance to avoid giving the vapors to delicate “progressive” students. And then, those students would engage in Rushdie’s form of censorship in order to avoid the trauma of microaggression.

High schools now teach Rent, The Laramie Project, The Book of Mormon, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and yet I have not heard of a single high school having students read, for example, essays or books written by conservative scholars on the nature and morality of homosexuality or marriage. Could that be considered censorship?

Is the free choice not to immerse oneself in a book that presents perversion positively and includes obscene images that violate one’s religious convictions ever justifiable in the incoherent philosophical universe of progressives? In their mad, mad, mad, mad world, do ideas have consequences?

This is not to say that Fun Home, which was made into Broadway musical and won a Tony award last May for Best New Musical, is utterly devoid of value. Through the depiction of her profoundly dysfunctional family, perhaps Bechdel has inadvertently offered insight into the environmental factors that may have contributed to her homoerotic attraction.

I say, kudos to the Duke University students. Moral lives matter.

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A troubling video has emerged in which a college student was asked if it should be morally permissible for an impoverished family to kill their 2-year-old or 5-year-old if doing so would improve the family’s condition. He answered that if society were to approve of this type of act, logic dictates it should be permissible, and he would be okay with it:

Feckless minds think alike. Here is another ethically-challenged Millennial:

It’s odd, “progressive” men seem to be allowed carte blanche to express their views on women’s “right to choose,” while conservative men are continually harangued by feminist harpies that they have no such right. Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, neither logic nor morality dictates such a position, but this kind of utilitarian, relativistic anti-moral code is not unusual among Millennials or within our increasingly “sub-pagan” anti-culture:

About 15 years ago, when I was substitute teaching in a Senior Advanced Placement English class at Deerfield High School, a conversation arose regarding absolute truth. The majority of students asserted that there exist no absolute, transcendent, eternal moral truths. (This was especially troubling within a heavily Jewish community in which the Holocaust is more than a historical footnote.) The rest of the students remained silent.

The notion that there are no absolute moral truths informs the controversial work of Peter Singer, Princeton University bioethics professor, who argues the following:

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.

…

Regarding newborn infants as replaceable, as we now regard fetuses, would have considerable advantages over prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion. Prenatal diagnosis still cannot detect all major disabilities. Some disabilities, in fact, are not present before birth; they may be the result of extremely premature birth, or of something going wrong in the birth process itself. At present parents can choose to keep or destroy their disabled offspring only if the disability happens to be detected during pregnancy. There is no logical basis for restricting parents’ choice to these particular disabilities. If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant’s condition than is possible before birth.

Though Singer has a more, shall we say, limited and nuanced defense of child-murder than the Millennial stars of the above videos, the implication of the idea that older, more developed humans have the right to kill younger, less developed, innocent humans is evidenced in the increasing comfort with both infanticide and euthanasia that is spreading within our sickening culture.

It’s worth noting that every year the anti-ethics ethicist Singer is invited to the far-Left Chicago Humanities Festival, which runs from Oct. 24-Nov.8, 2015,  and speaks to sold-out crowds.

Singer’s views have metastasized not merely to the ignoramus-on-the-street but to academicians like Dr. Alberto Giulibini and Dr. Francesca Minerva who in a 2012 article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics defended the right to kill newborns who, in the doctors’ views, are  merely “potential persons”:

If criteria such as the costs (social, psychological, economic) for the potential parents are good enough reasons for having an abortion even when the fetus is healthy, if the moral status of the newborn is the same as that of the foetus and if neither has any moral value by virtue of being a potential person, then the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.

While these views may seem anomalous, remember President Barack Obama and Senator Mark Kirk opposed bans on partial-birth/late-term abortions, which are just inches or days from infanticide.

Divers social and intellectual shifts, including widespread embrace of apostasy and heresy, relativism, subjectivism, radical autonomy, and post-modernism, collude with the institutional forces of Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream press to dismantle and destroy culture. And who suffers most? Children, always children.

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