| I made a mistake of sorts in my recent column on double standards: I ran out of space before I could bring up the name of Herbert Marcuse. If a National Museum of Double Standards is ever built, we should name it for Marcuse and put a huge statue of him on the roof. Maybe he should be shown holding up two fingers, one for each standard.
Marcuse was a fashionable radical intellectual of the 1960s who believed that tolerance and free speech mostly serve the interests of the powerful. So he called frankly for "intolerance against movements from the right, and toleration of movements from the left." To restore the balance between oppressors and oppressed, indoctrination of students and "deeply pervasive" censorship of oppressors would be necessary, starting at the colleges and fanning out from there.
By the late 1980s, many of the double standards Marcuse called for were in place on the campuses and heading outward into society. Marcuse's candor was missing, of course, but everyone on campus understood that speakers, student newspapers and professors on the right could (or should) be treated differently from those on the left. The officially oppressed knew that they were not subject to the standards and rules set for other students.
Marcuse's thinking influenced a generation of radical scholars, who in turn deeply influenced the colleges and the law schools. They include Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado and the dread Catharine MacKinnon, who more or less invented hostile-environment theory and sexual harassment doctrine all by herself. Matsuda, who calls for censorship and speech restrictions for the powerful, sits on the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union -- one indication of how respectable double standards now are among the chattering classes.
Double standards are all around us now:
endless restrictions on abortion protesters that would never be applied to other demonstrators;
the belief that all-black college dorms are progressive, but all-white ones are racist;
explanations that the killing of whales is a universal social horror, except when conducted by the oppressed (Indians);
25 years of feminist yawning over feminist Mary Daly's ban on males in her Boston College classes, though a male professor who tried to bar females would have been hammered into submission in one day.
A reader sent in his favorite double standard: For the left, it's wrong to try to change homosexual behavior -- their choice or orientation must be respected and left alone. But this no-change policy does not apply to young boys. It's OK to view their boisterous behavior as a social problem to be solved. Continued... |