I am unremittingly hostile to the kind of abuse and mistreatment that is considered “normal” on our frat- and sorority-ridden campuses, these days, and have spoken out about the ridiculous manner in which some now attempt to use a totalitarian, moment-by-moment public adjudication of privately-given “consent” to accomplish poorly and unjustly what has from time immemorial been accomplished by marriage (public giving of permanent and exclusive consent together with embrace of responsibility for all offspring of the union) and its related cultural institutions.  As a result, I am pretty tough on “rape culture” in the sense that concentrates on real dangers to the sexually vulnerable, though unlikely to subscribe to tenuous ideological constructions that erode our grip on reality and our ability to preserve ourselves and protect others.

And it is in the grip of that unfortunate irony that I happened to read two pieces in juxtaposition, today.

These two pieces lead me to meditate on how close to deranged our conception of “safety” has become:

Students at both Oberlin College in Ohio and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., have been crying out that they fear for their safety because conservative groups invited someone who disagrees with their views on sexual assault and rape culture to speak on campus.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism?, spoke at Georgetown last Thursday and is scheduled to speak at Oberlin tonight.

[…] Georgetown students placed a “trigger warning” sign outside of the speech, advising that it would “contain discussions of sexual assault and may deny the experiences of survivors.” A photo on Twitter shows a student holding another sign reading, “TRIGGER WARNING: anti-feminism” and advertising the location of a “safe space” for anyone who might feel traumatized by Sommers’s opposing views.

(source: Students Fear for Their Safety Because Conservatives Invited a Speaker to Campus | National Review Online)

Compare this to the following (and do read the whole thing): 

They were law-abiding. They didn’t buy or sell drugs. They weren’t violent. They weren’t a danger to anyone. Yet there were cops — surrounding their house on the outside, swarming the house on the inside. They even taunted the family as if they were mere “perps.”

As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous warnings.

Don’t call your lawyer.

Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends.

The entire neighborhood could see the police around their house, but they had to remain silent. This was not the “right to remain silent” as uttered by every cop on every legal drama on television — the right against self-incrimination. They couldn’t mount a public defense if they wanted — or even offer an explanation to family and friends.

Yet no one in this family was a “perp.” Instead, like Cindy, they were American citizens guilty of nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights to support Act 10 and other conservative causes in Wisconsin. Sitting there shocked and terrified, this citizen — who is still too intimidated to speak on the record — kept thinking, “Is this America?”

(source: Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought It Was a Home Invasion’ | National Review Online)

Now, it should follow a fortiori that anyone who thinks a discussion of certain controverted facts is a “violent” act that could cause harm also thinks that the actual use of public raids and gag orders to target political opposition, which definitely does cause actual harm and is the very essence of “violence” (that is, force without a rationale that should justify it), is objectionable.

I eagerly await the public outcry–especially among those most vulnerable to coercion by the unaccountable bureaucrats and reckless ideologues who dominate these discussions–against the outright statist violence in Wisconsin.