By CHRISTOPHER MANION
The University of Notre Dame has updated its video on “sexual orientation and gender discrimination,” the student-run Irish Rover reports. Watching the video is required of all freshmen before they are allowed to matriculate, author Joseph DeReuil reports, and students are also required to complete a questionnaire inquiring into the new students’ sexual orientation(s) and preferred pronouns.
Well, 58 years ago some psychologist passed out a questionnaire to us incoming freshmen and gave us half an hour to complete it.
After scanning the dozens of questions that amounted to a verbal Rorschach Test, I checked “don’t know” on all of them and left after five minutes.
The inquisitive Doctor was not pleased, but Notre Dame’s Gender Gendarmes have learned a thing or two since then.
These days, you walk out on the R-rated video and you can’t go to class.
DeReuil continues:
“According to the video, ‘gender identity’ is ‘an individual’s inner sense of being male, female, or differently gendered person,’ which ‘may not match their biological sex,’ this latter situation being offered as the definition of transgender.”
“These definitions were offered without any qualification or explanation. Rather, the Division of Student Affairs proceeded to interview individuals who identified as part of these groups. Amidst interviews with several openly gay, bisexual, and ‘queer presenting’ students, the viewer was requested to move ‘towards acceptance of others’ regarding their various sexual orientations.”
“The incoming Notre Dame students who had to watch this video were also told explicitly that being kind to LGBT individuals is not doing enough. They must ‘move from kindness to allyship.’ Furthermore, the video asked the incoming students to act as if same-sex relationships are ‘no big deal’.”
This amounts to bullying, of course. Sodomy fans got “anti-bullying” classes forced onto high schoolers in the 90s. A generation later, dissatisfied with being “equal,” they now play the bully, and the trapped audience of ND freshmen are the victims.
Sick.
The video was narrated by Fr. Gerry Olinger, CSC, who is evidently in the running to replace James Martin, SJ, as the nation’s champion of moral heresy. After all, Martin has only the “authority” of the Jesuits, which is fading fast. But Fr. Gerry’s hijacking of the seal of approval of “America’s premier Catholic University,” on the other hand, might give sodomy a shot in the arm…or somewhere.
Gerry is no amateur; he knows his Lenin, stealing and perverting revered symbols wherever he can. As the always dependable Notre Dame alumni at Sycamore Trust point out, he presents his remarks while “images of the rotunda and the Sacred Heart of Jesus roll in the background.” And in celebrating Notre Dame’s mandatory alliance with sodomy, he states that “Church teaching is at the heart” of university policy on diversity.
As ND Law Professor Charlie Rice used to say, “I’m not schizophrenic. Neither am I.”
In 2009, Charlie wrote What Happened to Notre Dame? (St. Augustine Press). Obama had just received a royal welcome (in return for which he sent a royal sum of taxpayer dollars in the form of a federal grant).
But it isn’t money — although today Notre Dame is floating in it, with tuition and fees now amounting to $77,011, including room and board.
Quite a price for being subjected to the Groom Squad for four years.
No, Ralph McInerny, Notre Dame’s most outstanding scholar of his generation, put it gently but truthfully: It was the university’s “vulgar lust for prestige” that drove it off the cliff.
But wait — don’t the kids at ND’s Mendoza Biz School want jobs in the big time?
And isn’t Big Biz totally owned by the Radical Woke?
Well, yes, and yes. So there’s gold in them there thrills.
Yesterday was the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I wonder if Gerry knows Our Lady’s pronouns. . . .
We Welcome A Bright Northern Light
When asked about the afterlife, Karl Marx once replied that “a good socialist doesn’t ask that question.” Today, forbidden questions abound, and “good Americans” are warned that a lot of answers aren’t allowed either.
Along comes Dr. Harley Price, a classical scholar and critic who breaks all the rules and offers a sober and delightfully readable account of what’s behind the “No Trespassing” signs wielded by our own era’s version of Orwell’s Thought Police.
But we wonder: Can anything good come out of Canada?
Fear not, from the edges of the Woke Wilds we find a refreshing antidote to cheer up the best of us in a new book from our friends at FGF Books (Give Speech a Chance — Heretical Essays….On What You Can’t Say Or Even Think, Harley Price, Ph.D. FGF Books: Amazon, $25.00).
A while back I was blessed to know Allen Taylor, a prominent lawyer from Milwaukee. He once mentioned that for years he had represented the Harley Davidson motorcycle company that was headquartered there.
“Why are they so noisy,” I asked. Every weekend there were endless caravans of them loudly crossing the bridge over the Shenandoah River at the edge of our farm.
He smiled, arched an eyebrow, and said, “Well, they insist that they’re quiet when they leave the factory.”
That line came to mind as I read Dr. Price’s essays. It didn’t take long to realize that this Harley was decidedly not quiet when he left the factory!
Nor has he been since. In fact, in demanding that we “Give Speech a Chance,” he takes every chance he can get to rejuvenate the fallow fields endlessly plowed under by the Usual Suspects.
Dr. Price received his M.A. from the esteemed Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in classics from Princeton University, winning over a dozen awards and fellowships on the way.
Since then, he has taught and lectured on such a wide and fascinating array of serious literary themes that it’s no surprise how engaging and, more than occasionally, fascinating, it is.
In the midst of it all, Robert Service’s line comes to mind — “They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest.” That’s Harley Price, refusing to fit in to WokeWorld, but able to rise above it with a wry smile and many an encouraging word.
And yet, for us Dr. Price seems to fit in everywhere, whether he’s teaching Dante, or Ovid, or Cicero, or Plato, or cheerfully applying his scalpel to the Left’s inviting “Offendeditis.”
Dr. Price dedicates his book to our beloved Joe Sobran, and allows our dearly departed brother to inspire his work throughout.
“As Joe Sobran has observed, it is invariably conservatives who are guilty of ‘hate,’ whereas liberals feel only justifiable ‘outrage’,” he writes.
Well, their Freudian Slip is showing. If “Trump’s amateur analysts . . . were honest, they would admit that hate, rather more than hurt, is indeed the emotion they feel” (p. 214).
While the prominence of Dr. Price’s multiple targets of opportunity is evidence that we are indeed “on the brink,” he calmly shreds them with wit and a fertile flow of common sense that enlivens his evident erudition. His work clearly proves the worth of a classical education when confronting a collapsing culture.
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