It is sometimes painful and isolating to be a conservative
student at a liberal law school. This is
bad news for the left.
A few months ago, Yale Law School’s Federalist Society
invited a speaker from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which successfully
argued the Masterpiece Cakeshop case
in the Supreme Court. The invitation was
condemned by multiple student groups, some officers of the Society received
angry emails, and there were protests during the event. Some students said that people who agreed
with ADF should not be admitted to the law school.
One of the Federalist Society leaders, a conservative
Christian student, has now published a cri
de coeur about his law school experience, which (aside from this
episode) has, he says, involved persistent bullying and denunciations by
progressive students. “I came to Yale
Law School feeling optimistic and grateful for the opportunity. I knew that I
would be in the intellectual minority, but I hoped that I could reasonably
disagree with and learn from my peers. . . . I am deeply disappointed.” He describes the reaction to the ADF
invitation as "over-the-top even by Yale standards."
Prof. Mark Tushnet correctly responds
that the reaction “looks a lot like counter-speech to me, and there's no
indication that the protests and support groups interfered with the ability of
those attending the event to hear what the speaker had to say. . . . I look forward to finding out if this episode
enters the canon of conservative stories about limitations of free speech
on campus.”
But there’s still an ethical problem. Counterprotests are fine, but no one should
leave law school feeling bitter and alienated.
And of course Yale isn’t the only place where this sort of thing
happens.
Free speech includes the right to say things that no one
should say. The students who treat
conservatives this way are within their rights.
But they are hurting the law school, they are hurting their fellow
students, and they are hurting their own legal education. They are also leaving the impression – more
than the impression, the knowledge,
based in bitter experience – that people on the left are unkind and vindictive.
I’m on the political left myself, and I’ve been a gay rights
advocate for many years,
but I think the Yale Federalists were right to invite the ADF. It is an influential litigation
organization. I happen to disagree with it
on a lot of issues, including
Masterpiece. It has been on the wrong side of pretty much
every gay rights question that the courts have confronted. Debate about fundamentals is what a university
is for. John Stuart Mill pointed out
long ago that, in order to respond fairly to arguments with which one
disagrees, one “must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe
them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.”
If you want to fight the ADF – I do – then you have to learn
to turn the chessboard around and anticipate what they will say. That skill, more generally, is what lawyers
are supposed to be good at. The last
thing you should do, if you’re a law student, is refuse to hear someone whose
arguments you can’t stand, particularly someone who has successfully litigated
against your own view.
Prof. Michael Simkovic argues
that the invitation to ADF was beyond the pale because it “has been identified
by mainstream media organizations and the Southern Poverty Law Center
as a hate group because—unlike some religious groups that
have misgivings about the theological acceptability of homosexual
acts—this group has advocated for criminal prosecution of homosexuals by
secular authorities at least as recently as 2013.” He argues that this “entire unfortunate turn
of events could have been avoided if the Federalist Society vetted its speakers
more carefully and favored substance over shock value. There are plenty
of other highly capable lawyers who can argue effectively for religious freedom
in situations that challenge progressive views of gay rights, and who are not
associated with any actual or suspected hate groups.”
The once admirable Southern Poverty Law Center has unhappily
devalued
its currency by using the label “hate group” way
too freely, assimilating peaceful litigators like the ADF with
violent racist militias. The ADF isn’t a
bunch of skinheads with guns. It
represents a major force in American public law. Students need to know what its lawyers have to
say for themselves.
The ADF‘s views about gay rights are awful. They are gravely and tragically wrong. It is deplorable that they believe what they
believe. They should be ashamed of
themselves and repent.
But a person can’t help what they believe. That’s also true of the Yale Federalists, if
any of them happen to agree with the ADF’s views. Treating them badly because of what they
believe doesn’t change their minds. If you’re one of those students who join
the boycott and the shunning, not only don’t you get to hear from the ADF
speaker, you also don’t get to talk to your fellow students, who are likely to
be bright people from whom you could learn something.
To turn to a more common example of ideological shunning, a
number of people have told me that they’ve ended friendships over the Trump
question: “I can’t stay friends with
someone who supports that guy.” I
despise Trump too, but I don’t get it.
You break off the friendship, Trump remains in the White House, and now
you have one less friend.
I’ve gotten to know many opponents of same-sex marriage,
often after publicly debating them. Not
only have they helped me sharpen my arguments.
They have been fun to talk with.
I like them. I think they’re
horribly mistaken, with pernicious views that harm people. I feel contempt and pity because they can’t
see that they’re wrong. But of course
they feel the same way about me. So what
are we supposed to do? What can we do,
except keep talking?
I like to think that we on the left are the reality-based
community. We don’t run away from
inconvenient truths like climate change.
We believe in science and history.
Yet truthful information about what our opponents believe is treated
like some vile contaminant, to be avoided whenever possible. Ignorance is virtue. But the reality is that these people
exist. They honestly think what they
think. The only way to know what they
think, and why they think it, is to talk to them.
There are costs to the Trumpian technique of building social
solidarity by singling out a class of despised others for collective
hatred. Shutting these people out also deprives
us of a distinctive intellectual pleasure, one worth cultivating a taste for. It is fascinating to discover, in detail, how
such smart people can believe such silly things. It’s one aspect of our strangely complex and
weird world, like black holes and luminescent squid.