Op-Ed Your opinion, but my life affected

Author: Kevin Moss, Professor of Russian

I find it profoundly ironic that those of us who object to the Rehnquist chair are painted as intolerant of diversity. One alum wrote and suggested that while he might disapprove, he would not protest should I name a chair to honor an equivalent liberal (he suggested Martin Luther King or Ted Kennedy). My response is that I would accept the challenge if he could find a liberal figure who ruled that being conservative should be a felony, whose rulings were used to deny conservatives custody of their children or deny them jobs or the right to sleep with their wives.

But to charge us with silencing our opposition is absurd on its face. For one thing, not one of my colleagues has suggested that conservative faculty, students or alumni should have no right to speak. Feel free to support honoring Rehnquist! After all, it is you who have the full support of the administration, which orchestrated a widely-reported visit to roll out the chair. Parents and alums have applauded the chair. This hardly constitutes a silencing of conservative voices. I realize that my own opinions and values are not those of the whole Middlebury community. As a community, though, we did adopt a nondiscrimination clause that includes sexual orientation. Rehnquist's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick and his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas directly contradict those values. He joined an opinion in Romer v. Evans that endorsed singling out homosexuals and denying them protection as a class.

Students cite the ostensibly apolitical opinion in Bowers, which indeed holds (with a gratuitous condescending sneer) that to claim a right to sodomy "'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious." But in 2003 a majority of justices (but not Rehnquist) found precisely that right: "individual decisions concerning the intimacies of physical relationships, even when not intended to produce offspring, are a form of 'liberty' protected by due process."

If there are any lingering doubts about Rehnquist's motivations in denying gay rights, while his equally learned colleagues found constitutional grounds to grant them, I would point to Ratchford v. Gay Lib, in which Rehnquist's dissent justifies a university's right to ban a gay group from campus, drawing an analogy to quarantining students with measles: meetings of homosexuals at the university may be dangerous, he writes, and "this danger may be particularly acute in the university setting where many students are still coping with the sexual problems which accompany late adolescence and early adulthood…" "Measles," "danger" - Rehnquist's words. Are these the views that are shared by our conservative students?

I am not intolerant of these opinions: these opinions are intolerant of me. The clash of views is all very good and well, and certainly academic discussion of all kinds of views, hateful or benign, belongs in a college community. But when those opinions impinge on my liberty in even such a trivial matter as, say, having sex with my partner or my right to marry, then, yes, I may react. The repercussions of the Bowers decision before it was rightly overturned were far-reaching: not only were homosexuals made felons, but homosexuals were denied jobs for being potential felons. Children were taken away from lesbian mothers and gay student organizations were denied.

I defend the right of supporters of such injustices to speak, but I object to Middlebury honoring Rehnquist with a chair and associating his name with the college to which I have devoted over 20 years. I object because I want Middlebury to be a better place.