
Liberal Students Call Conservative Speech “Violence”
Feminists at Oberlin College and Georgetown University are not just convinced that they are right and the people that disagree with them are wrong. They have decided that even the presence of ideas that conflict with their viewpoint is dangerous. When they learned that conservative thinker Christina Hoff Sommers would be coming to speak at their campuses, they rushed to condemn the choice with everything they had.
At Georgetown, this meant placing a big “trigger warning” sign outside the meeting hall where Sommers was scheduled to speak. This sign warned all who might enter the hall that there would be “discussions of sexual assault that may deny the experiences of survivors.” They advertised a separate “safe space” where those who left Sommers’ speech traumatized could go and be reassured that they were back on solid liberal ground.
At Oberlin, it meant writing a long op-ed for the school newspaper entitled: “A Love Letter to Ourselves.” In the piece, the authors encourage their readers to “pull together in the face of this violence and make out own space to support each other.” They call Sommers a “rape denialist,” a term which they are forced to define since it is one they made up themselves. According to them, a “rape denialist” is one who “denies the prevalence of rape and denies known causes of it.” In normal-people words, this means she denies the statistics that feminists use and the causes feminists use. That’s not denial, though. That’s reality.
Liberals – especially those of an extreme bent like campus feminists – have lost all perspective of what it is to live with differences of opinion. Instead of arguing the facts, they have chosen to retreat into their shells like frightened turtles, leaving a SAFE SPACE sign out front. Instead of having a discussion, they make up terms like rape denialist and victim-blamer and decide that anyone who fits these terms is a bad person. They repeat these slurs with passionate fervor, hoping that they can draw a line of connection with their made-up words and terms like “Holocaust denier.”
And in the meantime, they will simply refuse to engage. If these feminists ran for office, they would sit in the audience instead of standing at the podium. Instead of arguing their point when their time came, they would hiss from the cheap seats and call their opponent names. This is the same liberal philosophy that sees fit to slap a “climate-denier” label on Republicans without addressing the arguments. They are mockers and protestors and screamers, and they do not deserve to be taken seriously at the national level. Or on any level, for that matter.