Former Vice President Mike Pence’s hugely successful speech at the University of Virginia this week isn’t just a rebuke to school newspaper editors who wanted Pence stifled. It’s a lesson to overwrought collegians in general.
Free speech is a blessing, not a threat.
Exposure to other points of view spurs understanding, not “violence.” And for those fortunate enough to be in college, which, by the way, is a remarkably coddled existence, especially at “elite” schools, your job is to learn by listening and discussing, not to act as arbiters of what others can hear.
In an astonishingly juvenile and myopic editorial, the Cavalier Daily had argued that Pence should not be allowed to speak on campus because he allegedly traffics in “rhetoric that directly threatens the presence and lives of our community members.” The editorial used ironic quotation marks around the phrase “diversity of thought,” as if to question the validity of the very idea. It repeatedly mischaracterized Pence’s statements and called him “racist” without the slightest reasonable justification. The editorial also bristled at the very idea that a speaker would “take a stand for America’s founding.”
And this is at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson and largely nursed into existence by James Madison.
Chicken Little had better emotional grounding than these students, and Mr. Magoo had a wider perspective.
Despite the worries of these student nonjournalists that the sky would fall and lives would be lost if a recent U.S. vice president opened his mouth on campus, the event instead was a triumph. Even the Washington Post noted as much. The first sentence of the Washington Post’s report observed that “former vice president Mike Pence talked about the fight for freedom in a speech at the University of Virginia, an event that had sparked heated debate about free speech before he arrived, but proceeded calmly and respectfully Tuesday night.” Furthermore, “Pence was greeted by a standing ovation in the hall Tuesday, laughter at his jokes, and repeated applause during his speech.”
Rather than speaking words of anger or hate, Pence spoke compassionately:
“The last student to stand up asked Pence what he would do if one of his children came out to him as gay. Pence said, to loud applause, that he’d look them in the eye, and tell them, ‘I love you.’ He went on to say that he believes marriage is between a man and a woman. But we live in a pluralistic society, he said. And the way we come together as a country, ‘is when we respect your right to believe, and my right to believe, what we believe,’ he said.”
The Washington Post reported that this statement, too, won Pence a “standing ovation.”
Someone now needs to ask the college editorialists if the event really was as horrifying as they predicted. Were their presence and lives harmed by a vice president extolling freedom?
These members of the campus thought police had written that “we must seriously consider the environment we wish to tolerate.” It’s always amusing to see leftists try to explain how they demand tolerance for everybody except for those they themselves won’t tolerate.
The purpose of a university is to open minds, not to close them. Putative students who insist otherwise may seem to have found “safe spaces,” but eventually, they’ll find it’s hard to live in a bunker without any light.
