aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, January 30, 2006

The daddy state

Another excerpt from Michael Bérubé’s excellent talk, Recent Attacks on Academic Freedom: What’s Going On:

What animates the radical right, in other words, is not so much a specific liberal belief about stem-cell research here or gay civil unions there; on an abstract level, it’s not about any specific liberal issues at all.  Rather, it’s about the very existence of areas of political and intellectual independence that do not answer directly and favorably to the state.  So, for example (and this is my final example, chosen especially for you librarians out there), when in April 2005 Alabama state representative Gerald Allen proposed a bill that would have prevented Alabama’s public libraries from buying books by gay authors or involving gay characters, he wasn’t actually acting as a conservative.  Real “conservatives” don’t do that.  He was behaving like a member of the radical right.  Indeed, his original intent was to strip libraries of all such works, from Shakespeare to Alice Walker; and as he put it, “I don’t look at it as censorship.  I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.”

It used to be that conservatives objected to the coddling of the liberal mommy state; what their time in power has demonstrated - including, significantly, the reign of King George - is that the radical right wants a stern daddy state. Can those few real conservatives who are left take back their movement?

The video via Mediasite is available for another 25 days.