2316
(3 votes, average 3.67 out of 5)
Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Feb 10, 2011
Ironically, political science professor and conservative blogger John McAdams was the first person to report on Ronni Sanlo’s visit to Marquette University to explore campus conditions for LGBT people. On Oct. 30, 2010, he posted an item on his blog Marquette Warrior that began: “It was supposed to be hush-hush.
“Chris Miller, vice president for student affairs, invited lesbian activist and director of the UCLA Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Campus Resource Center Ronni Sanlo to Marquette as a ‘consultant.’
“Marquette’s website contains nothing at all about the visit. E-mailed invitations were sent to people who are apparently gay, lesbian or ‘allies’ on campus. The thing ceased to be hush-hush when we obtained an e-mail chain and ‘outed’ (to coin a phrase) the whole affair.”
The man sometimes known as Marquette’s Glenn Beck was clearly not pleased about Sanlo’s appearance.
In fact, members of the Marquette community told WiG that he’s probably the man she referred to anonymously in her report as “a professor who has publicly harassed and otherwise bullied Marquette faculty, staff and students without censure from the institution.”
But unlike Marquette officials, who declined to answer questions about Sanlo’s report, McAdams did not shy away from discussing it. He began by dismissing Sanlo’s findings as inaccurate and tainted, because she spoke only to like-minded people, he said. Brandishing a verbal acuity that even his detractors acknowledge, McAdams characterized those people as “the axis of grievance.”
“I like that phrase,” he added. “Use it.”
McAdams said he wanted to set the record straight (to coin a phrase) about life at Marquette. He painted a picture of conditions on campus far different from those observed by Sanlo, claiming that Marquette is ruled by a politically correct bureaucracy that’s “in business simply to cater to the aggrieved.” According to him, conservatives are afraid to speak their minds.
Present company, it seemed, was excluded.
When McAdams is not defending global warming deniers and Fox News commentators, he regularly blogs about Marquette’s “campus gay cabal,” “gay fascism” and “liberal elitist bigotry.”
While McAdams told WiG he believes gays and lesbians should be protected from harassment on campus, he cautioned that too many people at Marquette subscribe to the belief that “simply being disagreed with or told that homosexuality is a sin” constitutes harassment for LGBT people.
“I make the distinction between protecting gay and lesbian students from harassment and condoning their behavior,” he said.
“We live in a society where you can get a lot of leverage by being the victim,” McAdams said, alluding to what he called “the race hustle” as an example.
Apparently without irony, however, McAdams went on to complain at length that people who abhor homosexuality on religious grounds are victimized for their views and denied the right to impose them on others, even at religious institutions like Marquette. McAdams insisted that Marquette has a responsibility to protect its Roman Catholic identity, and he accused its leaders of shirking their duty to protect it by “catering” to gays.
“The fundamental virtue at (Texas) A & M is that the Catholic Campus Ministry there is actually Catholic, while the Campus Ministry at Marquette is liberal/left and politically correct,” McAdams wrote in a recent blog. “At Marquette, promoting the gay agenda and demonstrating against the School of the Americas seem to be the first two priorities.”
Although McAdams seemed to acknowledge to WiG that injunctions against homosexual behavior are scripturally scant, he expressed the commonly held view among conservatives that those injunctions are nonetheless central, if not paramount, to a Christian identity.
But McAdams vigorously defended the principle of academic freedom for his colleagues on the left, noting that he benefits from it as much as they do.
“I’ve published all kinds of things on my blog,” he said.
For proof, go to http://www.mu-warrior.blogspot.com.
