Tim Dunkin
April 22, 2015
Why do we put up with liberals?
By Tim Dunkin

Left-wingers and progressives in America are becoming insufferable, are they not? It's quite apparent that they have no desire to "live and let live," but want to force their delusions off onto everyone else. You will live, think, and do as the Left tells you, whether you like it or not. Even in the pettiest of way, they can't help themselves.

Take, for example, this story coming out of the University of Oregon. To summarize for the reader, a student named Elle Mallon, who was running for office in student government filed a number of grievances against a rival student organization also running candidates in the recent election. The grievances she claimed? First, that the rival group – We Are Oregon – had organized a campaign event in a building which did not have "gender inclusive bathrooms." She successfully (!) managed to get the ASUO (Associated Students of the University of Oregon) Elections Board to sanction We Are Oregon for this transgression, causing that group to be forbidden to campaign for 36 hours. The campaign manager for We Are Oregon, a student named Taylor Allison emailed an apology (!) to Ms. Mallon. Mallon then filed an addition grievance, claiming that Allison had "misgendered" her and charged her with sexual harassment. How so? Because Ms. Mallon has invented a whole set of pronouns – all her own – and demands that people address her using these pronouns (!). She wants people to use these entirely made-up words ("Mx" for "Ms.," "xe, xhem, and hyr," presumably for "he, it, and her" [?]) when referring to her or addressing things to her. Because Allison referred to her as "Ms." Mallon in the apology email, this was "sexual harassment" and grounds for additional sanctions.

Did you feel as ridiculous reading that as I did in writing it?

Eventually, the Student Constitutional Court heard the case and lifted the sanctions against We Are Oregon – but not on the grounds that the whole set of complaints were preposterous nonsense from start to finish and a waste of time that could have been spent more profitably watching paint dry. Rather, the court ruled for We Are Oregon solely on the technicality that bathroom access is not actually a "campaign related purpose," though not before admonishing them to be more mindful of their manners in the future,

"While this Court is empathetic towards Respondent's original grievance, and advises all future campaigns to remember their cultural competency trainings in order to promote as inclusive a community as possible, access to a bathroom is not a campaign related purpose.... "Sexual harassment is a very great evil, but the record supports the conclusion that only a single unintentional gender-based microagression occurred. To conflate the two may serve to salve the sense of anger Respondent may feel at Petitioner's mistake. However it may serve Respondent, it is unnecessarily inflammatory and risks damaging the reputation of Petitioner, an ASUO member who the record shows made a mistake, and then took the first opportunity to apologize. At no time was any of this relevant to the matter before the Court, which is a dispute over whether the Elections Rules require campaigns to provide gender-neutral restrooms."

"Cultural competency training"? "Microaggressions"? Seriously?

No wonder American millennials are "overeducated and underprepared" – they're too busy avoiding microaggressions and ensuring that their dorms will accommodate fifteen imaginary genders to have any time to actually learn anything of any value or use in the real world.

But the point here is not how ridiculous it all is, but how, despite its ridiculousness, this became a serious issue at this university.

Look, it's a free country. If Elle Mallon wants to invent weird little pronouns and use them in her speech and writing, that's her business. What she is NOT (or at least should NOT be) free to do is to require other people to have to use them, and to punish those who don't.

Yet, this story is really a microcosmic view of modern liberalism, leftism, progressivism, whatever term you want to apply. Everything the Left wants is coercive and detrimental to the rights of everyone else. Use the wrong pronoun? We'll sanction you. Do the wrong thing to or with your own property? We'll slap an injunction on you and sue you for tens of thousands of dollars. Donate money to the wrong political cause or group? We'll hound you out of your job, and we may even sic armed SWAT teams on you. Don't want to bake a cake for a "wedding" that goes against your deeply-held beliefs? We'll fine and imprison you. On and on it goes. Everything – and I mean everything – that those on the Left do is designed to force, coerce, compel, bully, or intimidate you into doing what the Left wants you to do, rather than simply allowing free people to do what they like in their own lives.

The question I have is this: Why do we tolerate this? Why do we tolerate them? I've already pointed out that left-wingers have broken America's unspoken-yet-real social contract for civil society, so why do we still feel obligated to show them any tolerance or any "fair play"? They deserve no tolerance from us. None at all.

It is high time for liberty lovers to wake up and get serious about resisting the left-wingers, the cultural marxists, the social justice warriors, and the rest. They only get away with the things they do because they are organized and we are not. A small minority of radical left-wing fanatics are busy making life increasingly miserable for the normal people in this country. Why continue to allow them to do so? Why won't we take the time and energy to stand up for what's left of the good and decent things in America? Why not get serious about putting them down at every turn, opposing them, protesting them, mobbing them, making things difficult for them? I am convinced that we have the numbers – but not the organization. It's time for conservatives, traditionalists, and liberty-lovers to get our heads out of the sand and stop being concerned only when something personally and directly affects us individually. What happens to the other guy today can and will happen to YOU tomorrow. Fight them, or suffer the consequences of cowardice and inaction.

© Tim Dunkin

 

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Tim Dunkin

Tim Dunkin is a pharmaceutical chemist by day, and a freelance author by night, writing about a wide range of topics on religion and politics. He is the author of an online book about Islam entitled Ten Myths About Islam. He is a born-again Christian, and a member of a local, New Testament Baptist church in North Carolina. He can be contacted at patriot_tim@yahoo.com. All emails may be monitored by the NSA for quality assurance purposes.

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