Recently, the Atlantic magazine held a summit in Washington on gay rights. Describing what took place as a “summit,” however, might be generous. As far as civil discourse goes, what took place was more of a nadir. And it is a worrying sign that the antidemocratic mania we’ve seen on college campuses of late is gaining a toehold among the nation’s ostensible elites.
During lunchtime, the conference scheduled a panel on transgender rights. The Scrapbook (mercifully) was not in attendance, but Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason magazine was there to chronicle the ensuing mockery of civil rights:
It went downhill from there. When the Atlantic‘s Steve Clemons and EEOC commissioner Chai Feldblum pushed back against Robinson’s logic, “those who thought having cis people on the panel was OK were branded complicit in the fact that trans people are often the targets of physical violence. Once again, nods and murmurs of approval from the audience.”
While it’s tempting to dismiss what happened as the ravings of a few identity politics obsessives, note that Robinson, a onetime West Point grad turned preacher on the margins of the Baptist church, has also been an executive director at the Human Rights Campaign, where, according to the Huffington Post, Robinson “drove the design and delivery of HRC’s broad portfolio of training and curricula for corporate leadership and employee audiences to improve LGBT cultural competence and inclusion in the workplace.” If you know how influential and well-funded an organization HRC is, it’s terrifying to think that Robinson’s fringe ideas about inclusion and diversity might be dictating training in a workplace near you.
As a general rule, more speech is better. But sometimes the best way to preserve free speech is to tell people falsely claiming to be victimized by it to put a sock in it. That’s what all those present for the Atlantic‘s panel should have done. As it is, the tacit willingness to politely entertain quasi-totalitarian attitudes at a prominent public forum does not bode well.
