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Back to the Closet

Progressives are Punishing a Gay Professor for Stating the Obvious

Progressives, drunk on cultural power and sanctimony, steeped in vapid ideology, and patinated in faux-fragility demonstrate that history does, indeed, repeat itself as the political left again become oppressors.

The most recent demonstration of leftist tyranny comes from the University of Washington (UW) where Stuart Reges, an openly homosexual lecturer in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, is being hounded out of his 15-year job by students, colleagues, and administrators who have no understanding of the critical importance of First Amendment protections to a healthy body politic.

The saga began in June of 2018 when Quillette, an online “platform for free ideas,” whose female founders “respect ideas, even dangerous ones” and “believe that free expression and the free exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress,” published an article by Reges titled, “Why Women Don’t Code.”

His article, inspired by the firing of James Damore by Google for the offense of writing an inter-office memo on, inter alia, the disparity in numbers between men and women and the absence of intellectual diversity at Google, addressed similar problems within academia, including the enraged responses to his pleas merely to discuss diverse views on diversity.

In this first article for Quillette, Reges established both his academic credibility as well as his bona fides regarding his commitment to fostering a love of computer science in young women. Then he addressed three professionally perilous topics:

  • Reges argued there are, broadly speaking, two different approaches to advancing workplace “diversity,” one of which is the “equality agenda” that seeks to remove “artificial barriers.” He calls the other approach the “equity agenda,” which “involves a commitment to righting the wrongs of the past. Political and religious diversity are not on their list because they don’t represent the immutable characteristics previously used to justify discrimination.”
  • The equity agenda’s view of “inclusion often demands the exclusion of ideas and opinions.”
  • Reges next stated what should be a commonplace observation: men and women are different. Instead, that observation was met with howls of outrage from those who ironically argue that in order to attract more women into the computer science field, the field must change in ways that will attract women—who, they claim from the other side of their mouths—are no different from men.
  • Finally, Reges argued—with evidence—that there are complicated reasons for the male-female disparity in the field of computer science, among which are innate inclinations and free choice.

Jordan Peterson, 2018 cultural mega-star, then tweeted about Reges’ article, which put Reges on the radar of the faux-fragile and sanctimonious, including students and colleagues at his own school and in his own department. Since, Reges had a three-year appointment, the intolerant had to wait until December 2019 when his appointment expired to exact revenge, and exact it they did. In another article published January 11, 2020, Reges reported the following:

I was stripped of my primary teaching duties and given a highly unusual one-year probationary appointment. … In the 15 years I have been part of the school, I am the first regular lecturer to be offered less than a three-year extension. … The one-year reappointment is also odd given my faculty rank. I was the first lecturer in the College of Engineering at UW to be promoted to the rank of principal lecturer. The faculty code indicates that the normal period for reappointment for a principal lecturer should be at least three years. The administration had to obtain special permission from the provost to make such a short appointment. It is also perhaps worth noting that I am the only current member of the faculty in the Allen School who has won the Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the highest award given for teaching at UW.

At least as troubling was the response from a group of graduate students who filed a grievance against Reges with the Union of Academic Student Employees and Post Docs at the University of Washington (UAW) and then concocted recommendations that reveal their puerility:

  • A relaxation of grading on coding style.
  • Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually.
  • Training for TAs in inclusion and implicit bias.
  • Review of all course materials for inclusiveness. For instance, of a lecture that involves calculating body mass index (BMI) using guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, the report noted that it “seems insensitive to present students with a program that would print out that some of them are ‘obese’ while others are ‘normal.'”
  • A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases.

These graduate students also recommended “that courses incorporate inclusiveness best practices as outlined in an Allen School document,” including these:

  • The addition of an indigenous land acknowledgement to the syllabus.
  • The use of gender-neutral names like Alex and Jun instead of Alice and Bob.
  • The use of names that reflect a variety of cultural backgrounds: Xin, Sergey, Naveena, Tuan, Esteban, Sasha.
  • An avoidance of references that depend on cultural knowledge of sports, pop culture, theater, literature, or games.
  • The replacement of phrases like “you guys” with “folks” or “y’all.”
  • A declaration of instructors’ pronouns and a request for students’ pronoun preferences.

Puerility and Newspeak come to academia.

To illustrate the “mob mentality” among students and administrators, who seem to believe the ends of destroying the career of Reges justify hasty judgments, incuriosity, and deceit, Reges tells the story of an anti-affirmative action campus bake sale he attended:

[T]he UW College Republicans organized an affirmative action bake sale, at which cookies were sold to Asians for $1.50, to whites for $1, and to African Americans and Hispanics for 50 cents. Cookies were free to Native Americans.

I attended the event to see how it was received and ended up having an hour-long conversation with a young woman about race relations on campus. . . .

The Stranger published an article about the event which included photographs of my interactions with the young woman. I was quoted as saying, “I don’t see racism on campus.” … But, as footage of our exchange captured by a local news team later confirmed, what I actually said was “I don’t see rampant racism on campus.” A small but important difference between a denial of ongoing racism and a disagreement about its prevalence.

[T]he day after the article in the Stranger appeared, I received a message from the director of the Allen School which included this:

. . . in my opinion, this is not about freedom of speech, and it’s also not about affirmative action. . . . This is about your lack of sensitivity to minority students and your continued (and almost gleeful) denial of their experiences, which I find extremely regrettable and disappointing coming from somebody of your stature and experience.

[The director] later told me that his judgment was based entirely on the misreported quote. He didn’t ask me what had happened. He didn’t ask if the quote was accurate. He simply concluded that I was insensitive to minority students. How he decided that I was “almost gleeful” is beyond me, but it indicates a reflexive disapproval among some my colleagues since the publication of my Quillette essay.

So far, the oppressors have failed to break or even bend Reges. He has since “joined Heterodox Academy” and “attended the 2019 Heterodox Academy Conference and the 2018 faculty conference for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).” Reges won’t acquiesce to the oppressors because he understands what’s at stake. Perhaps his warning will strengthen the spines of conservative students, teachers, and administrators:

Today, the people on campus who need to worry about expressing their ideas are conservatives and religious people. Now it is gays doing the punishing of anyone who opposes gay marriage, gay adoption, hate speech codes, and civil rights protection for gays. Everything old is new again. I’m once again having private conversations behind closed doors in my office with closeted individuals, but this time they are students, faculty, staff, and alumni who oppose the equity agenda. They are deeply concerned about the university’s direction, but they are also afraid of jeopardizing their current or future job prospects. They also worry about losing friendships and professional relationships. One faculty colleague described it as “mob rule.” … I am concerned that people believe free speech is improving on college campuses when in fact things are getting worse. We have fewer overt examples of speakers being shouted down and disinvited, but now the censorship is going underground. Those who talk to me behind closed doors censor themselves because they know the consequences of speaking up.

If every conservative would speak up, the oppressors would lose.


This article was originally published by our good friends at Salvo Magazine. Check them out and subscribe to this great publication!




Federal Government Loves Homosexuality

Some may remember the scene from the film Moonstruck in which Cher slaps Nicholas Cage upside the head and yells “Snap out of it.” Somebody better slap the conservative community upside its collective head before the federal government spends all its time cooing at homosexuality.

Recently, the lovestruck Department of Justice, White House, and Congress have wasted valuable time and public resources servicing homosexual activists via a White House conference, a Department of Justice video, and three proposed bills.

Last week, President Barack Obama held an “anti-bullying” (nudge nudge, wink wink) conference at the White House to which he invited the infamous homosexual “safe schools” czar Kevin Jennings; openly homosexual Fort Worth city councilman Joel Burns; the 16-year-old executive direct of Gays and Lesbians United Against Discrimination; at least two representatives from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight “Education” Network; someone from the Human Rights Campaign; someone from the National Center for Transgender Equality; and someone from the Trevor Project.

The White House also invited the foul-mouthed, anti-Christian homosexual activist Dan Savage, creator of the “It Gets Better” project. Savage said the conference was “of tremendous symbolic importance,” but also complained that “What was never addressed is when the parents are the bullies.” Someone should ascertain exactly what Savage views as parental “bullying.”

The government has created a website dedicated to ending bullying, a noble mission concealing an ignoble ultimate goal and troubling underlying philosophy. The underlying philosophy includes three central assumptions: 1. Homosexuality is equivalent to race, 2. Homosexuality is morally positive, and 3. The expression of conservative moral beliefs constitutes illegitimately discriminatory speech, which contributes to bullying.

The ultimate goal is the eradication of conservative moral beliefs and the creation of a social and legal climate that make it impossible for them to be expressed. For those who have eyes to see, the website offers clues to this goal and philosophy.

There are three image links at the bottom of the homepage: one is a link to information on cyberbullying; one is a link to information on the White House Conference; and one is a link to information on “LGBT Bullying.” Remarkable. Of all the conditions for which students may be bullied, there’s a special image link and section dedicated to only two: homosexuality and “transgenderism” (more accurately, Gender Identity Disorder). Not one other disorder gets special attention — not attention deficit disorder, not attention deficit hyper activity disorder, not Asperger’s Syndrome.

And homosexuality and “transgenderism” are the only conditions constituted by subjective feelings and volitional acts that many consider immoral that get special attention. Promiscuous students and drug-users, for example, are often bullied. Why don’t those conditions get image links to their own special sections?

This Obama administration effort follows close on the heels of a pinheaded and inappropriate decision by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to create a video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Thomas Perez showed the DOJ video to public high school students in Silver Spring, Maryland. Here are a few of the comments made by DOJ employees, most of whom identify as homosexual, in their roles as government employees:

  • “Being different is cool.”
  • “Don’t be ashamed of who you are. Keep being yourself.”
  • “If I knew when I was eight that the thing that was causing me so much pain… would actually define me in a way that makes me very, very proud, I would get through it.”

These should be shocking comments to hear in a publicly funded project of the federal government. The federal government has made the astonishing public claims that homosexuality is “cool”; that no one should be ashamed of homosexuality; and that homosexuality should be a source of pride. The individuals who appear in this video are, of course, entitled to their own non-factual ontological and moral beliefs. In their roles as government employees, however, they have no right to promote those unproven, subjective, non-factual beliefs.

This video should be a public scandal. Imagine if philosophically conservative government employees appeared in a publicly funded video in their professional roles, saying that it is not cool to engage in homosexual acts; that homosexual acts are shameful; and that homosexuality is not something of which to be proud.

It is objectively true that no one should be bullied. It is not objectively true that homosexuality is cool; that people should keep living a homosexual life; or that homosexuality is worthy of pride or respect. No employee of the government acting in their official position has any right to promote those arguable moral beliefs.

At the conclusion of the high school propaganda session, likely held during Mr. Perez’s working hours, students were invited to sign the “It Gets Better” pledge, the first sentence of which states, “Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are.” A feckless statement, but oh so persuasive with non-thinking people. The statement suggests without stating that those who identify as homosexual should be respected for their homosexuality. That is a moral proposition which is widely rejected and which no representative of the government has any right to promote in their professional role.

Everyone deserves to be respected because they’re human beings created in the likeness of God. It should be obvious, however, that not every subjective feeling or behavioral choice is worthy of respect. Humans deserve to be respected for their humanness in spite of their disordered inclinations and immoral volitional acts.

But it’s not just the executive branch that’s dancing to GLSEN’s gay tunes. Our homosexuality-affirming legislators have been busy little bees of late, including our very own junior U.S. Senator, Mark Kirk. The technically Republican Kirk, who has a special fondness for all pro-homosexual legislation, has joined 18 Democratic senators and one independent to introduce the Senate version of the Safe Schools Improvement Act — S. 506, which will deny elementary, middle, and high schools federal funds to combat drugs and violence unless they also agree to explicitly address homosexuality and transgenderism.

Openly homosexual U.S. Representative Jared Polis (D-CO) and comedian U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-MN) have re-introduced their recently moribund Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA) bill — H.R. 998. According to the Human Rights Campaign, this act “would prevent schools from discriminating against students because of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of a person with whom that student associates or has associated.” If passed, SNDA will be used to censor any resources that express the view that volitional homosexual acts are not moral acts.

The Human Rights Campaign makes the amusing claim that SNDA has “broad support.” Here are the organizations that they offer as evidence of breadth of support:

SNDA is has broad support from over 33 national organizations, including: The American Association of University Women, American Federation of Teachers, American Civil Liberties Union, American Psychological Association, American School Counselor Association, Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, Family Equality Council, Gay-Straight Alliance Network, GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders), GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), National Association of School Psychologists, National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Center for Transgender Equality, National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of La Raza, National Education Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, National Women’s Law Center, PFLAG (Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays), People for the American Way, SAVE (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education), School Social Work Association of America, The Trevor Project and Transgender Law Center.

But that’s not all, two New Jersey lawmakers have recently reintroduced the troubling “Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act,” which will require colleges and universities that receive federal funds to add “sexual orientation” to their anti-discrimination policies, and asks for a “$250 million grant program to help schools form or expand campus anti-bullying programs.” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is repeating its warning about the dangers this bill poses to First Amendment rights.

And if our busy legislative bees fail in these efforts to pollinate our schools with their unproven, unstated ontological and moral propositions on homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder, it is reported that they will simply hide their dubious pieces of legislation in the Elementary and Secondary School Act, which is “the key federal statute governing primary and secondary education.”

When will our ideologically askew and overreaching administration compel Americans to abandon their cowardly, unilateral “truce” on the “social issues”? C’mon, conservatives, snap out of it!

Take ACTION: Contact your federal elected representatives and tell them not to support any legislation or taxpayer subsidized efforts that espouse either implicitly or explicitly the following ideas: that homosexuality is normative, good, a source of pride, ontologically analogous to race, or morally equivalent to heterosexuality. Such ideas are non-factual, unproven, controversial assumptions. No arm of the government has any business using public money to advance them.


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