What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Speak now or forever hold your peace

I'm glad finally to get a chance to blog about this. Consider the following scenario:

A Muslim works at a clothing store. A higher-ranked manager from another store is working one day, all day, at the Muslim's store. The manager starts talking about the drinks he had at the bar last night and how much he is looking forward to going to the bar tonight again after work. Noting the Muslim's discomfort, the manager chooses to bring the subject up again and again throughout the day. After changing the subject or ignoring the comments several times, the Muslim employee finally takes the manager aside and begins by saying, "You know, that whiskey you're talking about, that's bad stuff..." intending to go on to ask that the manager not goad him in this manner anymore in the future.

The manager steps back, begins laughing, and says, "H.R. buddy, H.R.!" The intent is clear: The employee is to be reported to human resources for speaking "offensively" to the manager. And that's just what happens. The Muslim employee is summarily fired. He explains what happened to the person doing the firing, and in response he receives a letter in which the higher-level management person ignores the allegation regarding the repeated references to drinking. Instead, the letter says something like, "You claimed that it was a factual statement about previous and future drinks that made you feel that your Muslim beliefs required you to speak out. Your actions were offensive and unprofessional. We have a zero tolerance policy regarding harassment. You are living in a country where drinking is legal, and you will find that many of your colleagues do drink alcoholic beverages. You must learn to live with this..." and so on and so forth.

Is it not self-evident that the employee would have a case for a religious discrimination suit? In fact, a fairly strong case? If anyone was creating a "hostile work environment" and engaging in "harassment," it was the manager who deliberately and repeatedly goaded the employee and then got him fired when he finally expressed his views on the matter of drinking.

Now watch the video here.

I note that the letter of dismissal makes it sound like Vadala spoke up immediately upon the manager's first reference to "her fiance," and makes it sound like this is his own account, when that in fact is contrary to his own account.

I also note that the assumption that one cannot harass someone by making factual statements is obviously false. Even waiving the tendentious statement that it is now, by legal fiat, a fact in Massachusetts that women can marry women (as though metaphysics is decided by court order), of course you can harass someone with factual statements. If a male manager followed a female employee around repeatedly describing a strip act he recently saw in excruciating detail, this would certainly be a form of sexual harassment even if every statement he made were factual. My scenario above illustrates the same point.

It looks like Peter Vadala isn't planning to bring a complaint of religious discrimination, so we won't, probably, get a test case. But this is a very serious matter. From my perspective, the world would be a better place if anti-discrimination laws hadn't been invented in the first place. But since they have been invented, the worst outcome is the one we get here--direct discrimination on the basis of religious views in the name of non-discrimination on the basis of homosexuality. That sort of one-sidedness is a straight road to liberal totalitarianism of a particularly bad variety, and we need to stand up now against it.

In hindsight, and with great cleverness, I can write a speech Vadala might have tried instead of the opening he did use. It probably wouldn't have worked, but he could have tried this: "It seems to me that you, as my superior in this company, have been harassing me today. You think that you know my views on a particular subject, and you keep trying to goad me to express those views. Perhaps you think you can get me in trouble in some way if I express my views. I want to ask you to stop that harassment in the future." It would be interesting to see what she would have done. She's obviously a bully, but that sort of jujitsu move tries to use her bullying against her.

But I applaud Peter Vadala for being a straight shooter. I wish him all the luck in the world in the future, and I wish for all of us the courage to speak up while we still can.

HT Scott W

Comments (19)

Lydia - ingenious parallel.

And this is perfect:

"From my perspective, the world would be a better place if anti-discrimination laws hadn't been invented in the first place. But since they have been invented, the worst outcome is the one we get here--direct discrimination on the basis of religious views in the name of non-discrimination on the basis of homosexuality. That sort of one-sidedness is a straight road to liberal totalitarianism."

So why is it that "the worst outcome" always seems to be the one we actually end up with?

btw - if I may inject a bit of levity here: it figures that the bosses who fired him were lesbians. Had they been gay men, they would have been far too captivated by his good looks even to consider that possibility.

So why is it that "the worst outcome" always seems to be the one we actually end up with?
Because human beings are perverse.

... and because it takes real and conscious effort to work for (and maintain) "the good."

All we know about Susan McGrath, who wrote the letter, is that presumably she's female. I suppose she could be straight.

Probably I'm trying too hard to make a serious response to your humorous remark, but without commenting on your hypothetical, Steve, I suspect that at least a _straight_ male higher-up would have done exactly what Susan McGrath did, to prove his liberal credentials to all and sundry.

I must admit, though, that women in positions of power generally are especially outrageous in their totalitarian impulses.

I contribute to American Thinker from time to time, but I can't get any conservative online journal or blog that will publish any article of mine that demonstrates with proofs, medical evidence, statistics, and so forth how harmful homosexual practice is.

Even Focus on the Family tempers its broadcasts and such in Canada.

Conservatives have decided that homosexuality isn't a choice, it isn't really deviant or unhealthy, and saying it is will marginalize you since the Seinfeldian rule is now at work - "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

Well, there's a world of things not only wrong with it, but it hurts children and young people, and creates more deviance, molestation, seduction into depravity and so forth.

For example. If homosexuality is simply biological, unchosen, why are the rates for it less in rural areas than cities, and why are blacks homosexual in greater numbers than whites?

Anyway, the conservative and a lot of the Christian media are so afraid of being tarred as homophobic that they've been cowed into acquiescing to all the sick claims made by militant homosexuals. They are very sick bullies and they are enjoying it. This is what the depraved do when they are given free reign.

Also, prior to the Stonewall riot in NY (started not by cops but by young male prostitutes who had been banned from the club for soliciting. It was a riot by underage prostitutes against the police enforcing a statute against their activities), in surveys homosexuals barely claimed that society oppressed them and caused all their emotional problems and anguish that needed redress. After the riots, gays polled more and more increased a claim that they were sorely mistreated until today, society is entirely to blame for their unhappiness.

I can't get any conservative online journal or blog that will publish any article of mine that demonstrates with proofs, medical evidence, statistics, and so forth how harmful homosexual practice is.

Keep trying Mark. The situation is worse now than 10 years ago, but at least a few organizations now realize that the lines have been drawn and that basic morality is under direct attack. Which they hadn't realized earlier.

I have had gay men around me at work, and while I don't antagonize them directly by insulting remarks, I also don't withhold comments (such as discussing an article on the phone) that I think the behavior is intrinsically disordered. I refuse to be cowed into pretending that moral disorder ought to be a protected victimhood status.

Lydia, it is always worthwhile to imagine what happens when ONE of the irrational ideas of the intolerant liberal PC crowd bumps up against ANOTHER of their irrational goof-ups, to see which way the sparks will fly, and whose "victim" status trumps today. To bad the liberals cannot be brought to see how self-incriminating their current PC lock-step intolerance is in the larger picture.

I think the situation with Calvin College is instructive here. Twenty years ago David Hoekema of the Philosophy Dept. at Calvin was an official in the American Philosophical Association and was involved in the debate where the phrase "sexual orientation" was added to the APA's policies. Hoekema accepted the phrase on the understanding that it referred _only_ to inclinations and _not_ to behavior, reserving the right for Christian colleges to refuse to hire or to fire people who were engaging in homosexual behavior. This was _incredibly_ naive, because anyone knew at that time that the intent of the liberal activists was that by including "sexual orientation" one was tacitly expressing approval of the behavior, since one was treating the orientation as normal. Moreover, if one hires someone of a homosexual orientation who considers that there is nothing wrong with that orientation and just _happens_ not to be sexually active at the moment, he might at any time find a partner and begin violating school policy, at which point one would be faced with an unpleasant situation.

Now, twenty years later, as we know, there is a group pushing the APA to blacklist schools that discriminate on the basis of homosexual behavior itself, and the position that homosexual behavior is immoral is characterized by this group--the Leiter crowd-- as the most horrible and arrant bigotry and as utterly beyond the pale, as a position that should not even be discussed as possibly true or given any hearing.

Meanwhile, Calvin College has hired so many faculty that are (at least) on-board with the full-scale homosexual activist agenda that there has been a huge blow-up just this year in which the board tried to say that faculty could be disciplined if they taught that homosexual "marriage" is okay. The board took the position that this position is contrary to the school's religious teachings, etc., which seems pretty obvious. The faculty are absolutely rebellious against this and have rejected it outright, claiming their right in "academic freedom" (even at a supposedly conservative Christian school) to advocate homosexual "marriage."

It appears that a blind eye has been turned over the years as the faculty, under the noses of the board, became more and more militantly liberal. At this point I doubt the board is going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle.

As for which "liberal" PC-shibboleth shall prevail when two bimp up against one another, that's simple: the one which most damages/weakens civil society.

This story is an interesting counterpoint to the recent English decision to confer the same protections of religious belief to global warming advocates, and prohibiting discrimination based upon that belief.

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjJlYTY2ZDAyZjRjNTFiZDU5ZjkyODIwZjA5YWZiMGQ=

Odd that it is only the religious who seem to be no longer protected by religious freedom.

Thanks for posting Lydia

I have just put up at my personal blog a post on homosexual activism and the way it has co-opted the notion of compassion:

http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2009/11/compassion-and-homosexual-activism.html

Readers may be interested.

Hoekema: As I recall, the fairly recent discussions of these matters indicated that others involved in the long-ago formulating of the APA nondiscrimination statement have quite different recollections (from Hoekema's) of the discussions and thinking that led to that statement. Neither side need be lying, of course (and I suspect neither is): it's very possible that some involved are just remembering the events differently, or that they had different understandings of the matter even at the time. I'll just say that if all that was intended what was Hoekema is saying, then those who drafted the statement seem to me to have done a *very* poor job of it.

Calvin: Wow. I'm quite sure Calvin isn't the hotbed of liberalism that you seem to fear it is--on this issue or generally. (If only! Where *do* you get your information?) The memo sent to the faculty proved quite a jolt even to many who are themselves against gay marriage, as it warned faculty against advocating certain positions either inside or outside of class, which seemed to many on both sides of the issue to be a severe and extraordinary constraint concerning what is, in their terminology, a "non-confessional" matter. I'm sure there are many more courageous conservatives (on this issue) at Calvin who are more than ready to actually fight this out, and don't want to proceed by forbidding those on the other side from stating their position. Calvin people, including the *very* many conservatives there, shouldn't be judged by that ill-advised memo sent to faculty: Most are more prepared to debate such issues openly than that memo, considered by itself, might lead an outsider to suspect.

Keith, I agree with the board on this one. I do _not_ think it is a matter of "academic freedom" for faculty members at an ostensibly traditional, Christian school to _advocate_ the position that homoseuxals can be "married." If they haven't managed to write the legalese of their confessional statements in such a way to make that clear, they'd better scurry and go do so.

Now, of course, this is all being cast as a matter of simply "discussing" or "debating" which are ostensibly sacrosanct in the academic world. (Yeah, uh-huh, unless you're B.L., at which point the _traditional_ perspective is "beyond the pale.") But this is a confessional, ostensibly relatively conservative Christian school. It is completely legitimate for such a school to require that their faculty members not undermine basic, traditional, Christian moral teachings on which the school takes a clear position. And we aren't merely talking about saying to students, "What could be said in favor of homosexual 'marriage'? Let's have a debate on the subject for the purpose of understanding the issue more clearly." No, we're talking about _advocating_ homosexual "marriage."

I get my information on this one from news stories. I don't even personally know anyone at Calvin, or no one I've been in touch with for years. I've read a couple of such stories which make it clear that the faculty are "united" in opposing the board's position on this. And I think that indicates a problem, even though you, of course, are now going to cast it in terms of their all just taking a meta-stance on academic freedom. Frankly, if they understood the tight connection of the issue with the Christian morality of 2,000 years, they'd be firmly on the side of the board's memo. Oh, yes, I also read Hoekema's letter to the APA and discussions by him of the "dialogue" they have at Calvin about the "issue." Oh, yes, and I also knew someone who applied for a job there several years ago and was horrified to discover that they have an on-campus gay and lesbian club. Upon inquiry, he was assured that, hey, it's okay, because actual gay and lesbian _acts_ are forbidden at Calvin. Please. Just how stupid are we supposed to be, that the existence of such a club--an actual, formal, club of the university, whose existence I verified at the time on-line--has no cultural ramifications?

I can name a lot of other Christian colleges that have no "gay and lesbian clubs" and don't pride themselves on all their "dialogue" about the morality of homosexuality. A Christian college that does that is not a _conservative_ Christian college, whatever else it may or may not be.

make it clear that the faculty are "united" in opposing the board's position on this

I don't know what newspaper reports you're reading, so this is speculative, but I my sense is that yes, the faculty can be at least pretty fairly described as being united against the board's position, but I imagine that's saying they're united against the ban on advocating certain positions either inside or outside the classroom -- not united in favor of gay marriage. (It would be very surprising if any responsible new source would get things SO wrong as to describe the Calvin faculty as united on THAT.)

If they haven't managed to write the legalese of their confessional statements in such a way to make that clear, they'd better scurry and go do so.

I wouldn't hold my breath on any such scurrying. I believe the confessions they subscribe to are old, traditional documents -- things like the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Canons of Dort, and the Apostle's and Nicene Creeds -- not things they go scurrying around adding to or changing.

A Christian college that does that is not a _conservative_ Christian college

Though Calvin is in fact fairly described as a pretty conservative college, by reasonable standards (the faculty not as conservative as the student body, I'd bet, but still pretty conservative on average), I don't think they advertise themselves as, nor aim to be (as an institution, no doubt certain individuals...), either a liberal or a conservative Christian college -- just a Christian college in the Reformed tradition. I haven't been on Calvin's web site in a while, but I *think* they're pretty clear about which confessions they all subscribe to (and there's quite a bit there, as I recall, including a couple of documents strong enough to curl *my* toenails), so there shouldn't be any confusion on what are and are not considered confessional matters. On non-confessional matters, including various political issues, interested parties should realize that while the college as a whole tends toward, for instance, Republican positions (so nobody should be surprised that Bush [the younger] and I think it was Rehnquist? get invitations, and the school has produced Republican politicians), there are some faculty and some students who think differently, and they generally won't be stopped from speaking their minds.

This, Keith, is not a mere "political" issue but, on the Christian view, a moral issue. No doubt that claim is something you think problematic, but it's been a moral issue in the Christian tradition since the time of St. Paul, and it isn't going to stop being one now. As far as I'm concerned, Calvin was toast quite some time ago.

My point in _this_ thread was the naivete of thinking you could enthusiastically affirm, as a Christian school, a position of "non-discrimination on the basis of orientation," mean by that _merely_ orientation while still expecting faculty to refrain from homosexual acts, and expect the liberal establishment to leave you alone in that position indefinitely. Of course it wasn't going to be left there forever. I'm only surprised it took twenty years for the further push to come. Nor should an institution expect such an affirmation--especially when voluntary and not a mere attempt to work within laws imposed from outside previously--not to change its character as a school.

btw - if I may inject a bit of levity here: it figures that the bosses who fired him were lesbians.

I think to some extent it's a male vs female issue, Steve. Women tend to crave approval, which is why there are so many volumes of feminist rants about the evil and tyranny of men not accepting female promiscuity. The worst thing a person can do to most women is withhold their approval of her lifestyle. Most of the gay men I've met will at least tolerate Christians who are polite in their disagreement with them.

Well, Mike, I think the implications of _that_ are an exaggeration. Activism and the push for curbing the freedom of people to express or act on opposition to the homosexual agenda are _definitely_ coming from male as well as female activists. Here in my town the recent "non-discrimination" ordinance--a particularly radical one including "transgender" rights--was passed with enormous support from plenty of male homosexual activists. I can't say I counted, but my impression at the various meetings was that there were at least as many males as females, and the carpet-bagger they brought in full-time to pass the ordinance was male.

This, Keith, is not a mere "political" issue but, on the Christian view, a moral issue.

This reality does not get enough attention - the religious and political overlap on questions of morality. Essentially, each is a system answering the same basic question "How then shall we live?"

Ah, but one can be a male without being a man.

... oh, and I wasn't calling homosexuals "sissies." I wasn't even talking about homosexuals ... I was talking about the long-term feminization of our society, about the fact that the minds of most males in present-day society are womanly (but without the womanly virtues) rather than manly.

Post a comment


Bold Italic Underline Quote

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.