By SHAUN KENNEY
If our Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos can actually pull it off? Three cheers for Title IX dismemberment.
For those who are slightly unfamiliar with the term “Title IX” and have children heading toward a college or university that accepts federal funds, be prepared to step into a rather dark and foreboding world.
Title IX is a section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which reads that no one should be discriminated against on the basis of sex.
Seems rather innocuous at first, and it is — until one dives deeper into how this tiny section of federal law has been exploded to cover things such as gender dysphorias, transgenderism, and used to create tribunals where victims are always believed and a mere preponderance of guilt is enough to ruin the career of a young man (or woman) — often with long-lasting repercussions.
The first institutions to fall under the progressive scythe were schools such as the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, both military academies with impressive pedigrees that produced young men of quality as a male-only institution that stretched back over a century.
After a decade-long tussle, both VMI and the Citadel eventually conceded their traditions due to Title IX pressure.
Yet under the Obama government, unable to pass his agenda through Congress, Title IX began to take on a horrifying new form.
Through a series of directives from the U.S. Department of Education, Title IX began to encompass a series of changes that turned this tiny section of the Civil Rights Act into a weaponized form of social engineering.
Here’s the game. A young lady and a young man at an institution of higher learning have an encounter. One participant claims — rightly or wrongly — that an act of sexual violence occurred. In the outside world, such a claim would be taken to law enforcement where evidence would be gathered, statements collected, and testimony weighed by attorneys and finally by a justice of the law in an environment where those present are deemed innocent until demonstrated guilty.
Not so in a Title IX tribunal. In this setting, a self-created Title IX office appoints members to a tribunal who are instructed that the victim in this setting is to be instantly and uncritically believed. Information is gathered, but the thumb is already on the scale. Instead, the accused must demonstrate their innocence before a kangaroo court. The standard for guilt? A preponderance of the evidence — not a conviction, merely a hunch.
The penalty for sexual assault in most states is a felony charge, typically as few as five years behind bars and a listing on a now constitutionally questionable sex offender registry. Within the Title IX structure, the penalty is dismissal from the college or university — no questions asked, with little hope or path for an appeal to a legal system. Often the punishments, if negotiated, consist of such arbitrary agreements as a reading list, essays, community service, or other forms of public penance.
Such are the witch burners of the modern age. These modern-day Puritans aren’t terribly concerned with victims or the accused; far from it. What they are more concerned about is creating an extra-legal institution as a workaround to the law.
What Hillary Clinton once deemed the tried and true methods of “peer pressure and shaming” are now being codified by a federal government bent not just on redefining longstanding institutions of marriage and family, but even gender norms, sexuality, codes of conduct and behavior, and especially thought.
If one wants to see how far the Title IX path goes, look no farther than Canada where legislation is actively being argued as to what penalties of law (yes, penalties) should be levied if one refuses to use one of the 76 different gender pronouns.
It was Professor Robert George of Princeton who once remarked that the most dangerous thing about political correctness isn’t its capacity to silence speech, but rather the capacity to silence thought.
Certainly the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act never intended Title IX to cover homosexual acts, transgenderism, and other various gender dysphorias as a means of social indoctrination.
Certainly the authors never intended the institution of Title IX tribunals in order to prosecute the violations of the new secular dogmas.
Yet instead, this is what the Obama administration has created within an education system that puts the finishing touches on what is proving to be 12 years of liberal arts indoctrination followed by another four years of ideological sharpening — where hard sciences and the classics are dodged for what are cloaked as “soft sciences” of psychology and sociology, but in practice have proven to be artful outlets for leftist ideological justification.
Hence the difficulty of addressing all the various forms embedded within this Gordian knot. Certainly the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has failed two generations of Americans. Birth control, rather than fulfilling the promise of autonomy, has rather victimized women into androgynous objects for sexual pleasure without consequence. No Title IX tribunal can fix this problem; it merely treats the symptoms with the heavy hand of peer pressure and shaming.
Missed as well is the discussion of young men and the long adolescence both mass media marketing and our institutions of higher learning are imposing upon what ought to be the first steps of one’s adult career. The university setting is supposed to admit men and women, not young girls and boys who are somehow blossoming into adulthood at the ripe old age of 25 instead of 18.
By refusing to treat students as what they are — legally certified adults who will endure real world consequences for success or failure as they create them — while sweeping instances of sexual violence under the rug in a Title IX tribunal, the Obama administration has created a twofold problem.
Not only does the Title IX process abrogate the legal process and deny the sort of closure the legal system indubitably provides, Title IX tribunals aren’t designed at all with the students in mind, but rather the protection of the reputations of colleges and universities. Title IX is muffling what ought to be the public consequences of a postmodern culture addicted to gratification and abusing the other person as a means to an end.
Of course, by no means should anyone argue that sexual violence is not a serious problem in America. One in eight women will experience some form of sexual trauma during the course of their lives. One in 33 men — and this number is disputed to be low — will experience likewise.
DeVos is taking yet another critical step with the new Trump administration in breaking the back of these lawless and extralegal institutions designed to protect liberal shibboleths by provide the mirage of a solution while only serving to perpetuate the social ills that have brought us to this pass.
For that, DeVos ought to be cheered mightily by those who are watching from afar.
For the rest of us who are preparing to send children and grandchildren into the maelstrom of the secular world, the advice is very simple:
Pray the rosary daily, wear your scapular, attend Mass weekly, go to Confession monthly. Good habits become virtues, and spiritual graces are the only antidote to a spiritually bankrupt and confused world.
I’m looking forward to hearing from Wanderer readers; write to me at the address below!
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Please send all correspondence for First Teachers to Shaun Kenney, c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Rd., Kents Store, VA 23084.
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