Our contestants for most depressing story of April 2015 so far include Iran, Baltimore, and the nothing-to-see-here media response to a likely jihadist shooting in suburban Texas. But there is worse out there, so let’s look behind door number four.
Here we have an op-ed from Columbia University’s student paper, the Spectator, about the terrible, horrible, experience some students have had reading … Ovid. Trigger warning: There was “triggering” involved. To wit:
Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.
Read the whole thing. It’s not as bad as you might imagine. It’s worse.
But for our winner, we have to go to the gay marriage crusade. In this week’s issue of the STANDARD, Mark Hemingway tells the story of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, a little bakery from just outside of Portland, Oregon. One day, a lesbian showed up and asked for a cake for her wedding. The couple who own the shop politely declined the business, explaining that they were Christians and couldn’t, in good faith, be a part of a same-sex wedding service.
You know what happened next: The gay-marriage crusaders descended on Sweet Cakes. The shop was driven out of business. So far, so bad—we’ve seen this movie before. But then an administrative judge in Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries levied a fine on Melissa and Aaron Klein, the former owners of Sweet Cakes, more than a year and a half after the couple had been driven out of business. The fine was for $135,000.
But wait—there’s more! Some people were outraged by this draconian administrative abuse and set up a crowdfunding page to help the Kleins on the website GoFundMe.com. (In much the same way the owners of Memories Pizza in Indiana were helped out when they ran afoul of the gay-marriage crusaders for having thought the wrong things.) In just a few hours $109,000 was raised for the Kleins. But the gay-marriage crusaders weren’t finished. Led by the owner of a very gay-marriage friendly bakery in Portland, the crusaders petitioned GoFundMe to deactivate the Kleins’ fund .
So this is the world we now live in: Two individuals who don’t want to provide one discrete service based on deeply-held religious convictions—and for which there are plenty of remedies from other providers—can now have their business destroyed and be pursued and bankrupted by the state far after the fact.
But a another business—a big one, it turns out—is allowed to decline to provide services to those individuals because doing so contradicts its support of same-sex marriage. And that sort of discrimination is genuine, bona fide, A-1, okey-dokey.
If you were given to such thoughts, you might think we live in a world gone mad.
But since I don’t want be all doom-and-gloom this week, I’ll leave with three items to hearten you. First, I mentioned Rusty Reno’s extraordinary statement of principle last week, but I gave you the wrong link. Here it is. It is absolutely worth reading in full.
Second, the latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol is out and it features Gary Bauer who is, in addition to being incredibly smart and interesting, one of the nicest people I’ve met in Washington.
And finally, if you’re a man between the ages of 35 and 45, this Punch-Out dramatization of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight will leave you on the floor. The humor, I’m afraid will be lost on everyone else. But for my cohort, it’s gold.
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