A double standard

Shawn Vestal concluded his Dec. 1 column, “Professor’s contempt for women is no fit for the classroom,” with the fanciful wish that Professor Scott Yenor of Boise State University be consigned to a functionless job in an underground office. I think Jennifer Edminster (“Yenor shows courage,” Dec. 17) rightly objects to the idea of abridging Yenor’s free speech. Post-secondary educators who meet threshold instructional standards should be given broad free expression, because we have to credit older students with critical intelligence, whether or not they possess it.

But I wonder if Edminster — who, among other things, baselessly implies that Vestal is ignorant of advances made by women in education and the professions — appreciates the reason for Vestal’s anger. Yenor’s harsh attacks on “critical race theory” abetted enactment of a bill, HR377, that could chill free speech. By its subjective terms, any school in which any teacher’s mention of past or present racism in America makes any white student feel uncomfortable could conceivably face defunding. We’re talking about grades K through 16.

Thus, Yenor is part of a move to squelch the speech of his ideological opposition. Yet he relies on First Amendment protection of his own, ultra-conservative free speech, which demonizes the left, bemoans the emergence of “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” independent career-oriented women, and argues for putting women back at hearth and home, where they can support the menfolk and breed, as God intended.

Particulars aside, Shawn Vestal’s disgust with that double standard in Idaho is completely justified.

Brian Keeling

Spokane