My former professor, John McAdams, has been under attack for the past several months and is now to be fired from his tenured position at Marquette University. His crime is a blog post in which he brought attention to an undergraduate’s experience in and after a philosophy course in which the teaching assistant refused the student the chance to discuss his position against gay marriage.

So to reiterate: McAdams’ offense was to call attention to a student who was denied the opportunity to give voice to the official position of the Catholic Church at a Catholic university. This was because, in the teaching assistant’s (recorded) words, “homophobic comments…will not be tolerated.”

What happened from there is an interesting story, and a letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education provides a pretty decent account of it. The only other material facts, though I think they’re actually distractions, are that the teaching assistant started to receive intimidating messages in the aftermath of the blog post. To be clear, that’s terrible and intolerable. But to blame it on McAdams’ blog post, as if calling attention to the student’s experience was so incendiary that people simply had to react with threats and intimidation, is ludicrous and tremendously threatening to academic freedom and, in a broader sense, free speech.

I’m searching online accounts of this story to try to find the other side, something that will complicate what appears to be really an outrageous offense against academic freedom. While I can see that the intimidations and threats against the TA were indefensible and intolerable, I cannot possibly see the logic of blaming McAdams for them.

In a world in which we feel compelled to identify with the grossly offensive Charlie Hebdo in the name of free speech, why can’t we identify with a professor or a student who voices unpopular views?

“…it is a childish spectacle. And we are trucked in just to give some dignity to the occasion. I mean, there are all these punch lines, and one side jumps up—­Hooray! And they all cheer, and then another punch line, and the others stand up, Hooray! It is juvenile! And we have to sit there like bumps on a log. We can clap if somebody says, “The United States is the greatest country in the world.” Yay! But anything else, we have to look to the chief justice. Gee, is the chief gonna clap? It didn’t used to be that bad.”

2) How to answer a question that shouldn’t have been asked:

“Yeah. Sure, I use the Internet.”

3) How to respond to an insult in an interview:

“Shame on you! I’m a damn good poker player.”

4) How to respond to a compliment:

Interviewer: “It [Community Nutrition Institute v. Block] was a really good opinion.”

Scalia: “Isn’t that good?”

5) How to become a Scalia clerk:

Interviewer: “How do you choose your clerks?

Scalia: “Very carefully. What I’m looking for is…”

6) How to preach and insult journalistic elites in one fell swoop:

Interviewer: “Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?”

Scalia: “You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”

7) How to totally get confused about proper versus common nouns:

New York Magazine editors/Interviewer: “Yet today, you’re a conservative icon, and federalist societies abound on ­university campuses…”

(You mean these Federalist Societies?)

8) How to be humble and a Supreme Court Justice

“You know, for all I know, 50 years from now I may be the Justice Sutherland of the late-twentieth and early-21st century, who’s regarded as: “He was on the losing side of everything, an old fogey, the old view.” And I don’t care.”

On a recent flight, I listened to a very outdated podcast of This American Life, one that detailed relationships that were broken by, wait for it, political affiliation. Ruined friendships, family members who won’t speak to each other, colleagues alienated in the workplace, even – my favorite – a woman denied entrance into a hiking club, all by political differences. The stories were exaggerated forms of experiences we probably all find familiar – being told that we “just don’t understand” the other side’s position on X, or having the conviction in a conversation that your interlocutor must seriously be missing a frontal lobe to believe some of the cant they’re spouting. (I mean, let’s be honest. It’s not just the other side.)

Fine, it’s normal. But the radio program was, I think rightly, lamenting the fact that disagreements over policy could wreak serious havoc on real, committed relationships, with the implicit question of “why? Why should this matter so much?” Why, indeed? Why should politics – the ideology or actions of a distant politician, usually within the Beltway, doing their thing – get in the way of my 15-year-long friendship, or cause such tension with my sister-in-law?

I think that asking that question actually betrays a certain statist—fine, one might say “liberal”—bias. Why, you ask, have we become so deeply entrenched in our red or blue commitments? Why are our differences, once a hallmark of the American spirit, now so insurmountable? Well, duh, if you put the state into every aspect of life, your colleague’s political opinion – and vote – does represent a threat to your own way of life. If the state is going to have its hand not just in roads and defense but in vaccines and phone records and kindergarten curriculum, the stakes of any political disagreement – especially with those you consider allies – are extraordinarily high.

So, dear NPR, if you want to bewailour intractable political fighting, perhaps you’d better reconsider running to Washington every time something needs change. Maybe, in order to have the freedom to disagree, we’re going to need a little bit of freedom to do things on our own.

This New York Times article from yesterday details a wing of the pro-life movement that is focusing on the ability of the baby to feel pain as a means of reducing the number of abortions. The idea is that, according to some research, a baby is able to feel pain after 20 weeks and therefore any abortions that remain legal should be conducted before that point.

What was particularly interesting, though, were these two comments that followed the article. They appear in the order in which they were printed, sans any redaction on my part:

Roger StensonBradenton FL
After 20 weeks gestation the unborn child has all the prerequisite anatomy, physiology, hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical current to connect the loop and create the conditions need to perceive pain.
Aug. 2, 2013 at 11:08 p.m.

Joseph Bianco St. Louis
Animals feel pain but that doesn’t mean we can’t kill them for our convenience.

I mean, um, exactly. I’m not sure if Joseph is trying to make an indirect pro-life point, an animals-are-people vegan point, or simply a very brutal pro-abortion point, but he sure makes the first one very well. Last I checked, we aspired to treat human beings better than animals.