My college lesson: liberals ignore other views, facts
COMMENTARY
Priya Abraham

In the 1995 movie “Outbreak,” Rene Russo and Dustin Hoffman battle to contain an Ebola-like virus brought to America by a monkey. When Russo examines the innards of one of the victims, her face runs the gamut from shock to horrified repulsion to pity.

“It looks like a bomb went off in there,” she whispers.

That’s the look I got from one of my favorite faculty members at dinner a few months ago — when I told him I am a conservative.

“No you’re not,” he said.

Eh?

Wouldn’t I know what my political leanings are? He thought I might be socially conservative (as befits someone of Asian Indian heritage), but not politically so. To be fair, as recently as two years ago that would have been an accurate assessment.

For example, in fall 1999, I wrote a column in the Skiff strongly advocating greater gun control. Foreigners cannot understand America’s “gun culture” — what a bunch of primitive yahoos, we think, wanting to protect their right to hunt when they could save people’s lives. Thankfully, Rex Helms from the Physical Plant wrote me a well-reasoned letter brimming with statistics on how gun legislation had failed and took away people’s ability to defend themselves against crime.

I ignored him. Liberals often do that.

I didn’t realize that this shutting out of non-liberal views was also happening repeatedly in the classroom. Any discussion, say of European imperialism, would invariably lead to a conclusion such as, “But let us not forget our own past sins, such as wiping out Native Americans and the Spanish-American war.” I never heard anything else. WASP Americans were always the bad guys.

The free marketplace of ideas that a college campus is supposed to embody seemed like more of a monopoly. Had I not stumbled across some conservative magazines, books and Web sites, I wouldn’t have even noticed.

They were disturbing. Their stances on issues ranging from gun control to foreign policy were diametrically opposed to my deepest convictions. I developed a horrid fascination for them, like staring at the mangled frame of a car wreck.

But these conservative articles stood out because their authors supported their claims with ample evidence and taut logic, without ridiculing their opponents. In addition, conservative intellectuals such as Thomas Sowell have a profound understanding of the presuppositions that mold and give cohesion to different worldviews. So nothing a liberal says would surprise them, no matter how much they disagreed.

That’s more than can be said for liberals in much of the media and academia. Witness the deluge of outrage that ensued over Franklin Graham’s remarks that Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion” after the Sept. 11 attacks. Why?

First, Graham is a preacher. Second, he believes that all people are sinners bound for hell and God’s wrath unless they accept Jesus as their Savior. Three, Islam categorically denies the divinity of Jesus or that He died to take the punishment for humanity’s sins. As such, holding to Islam would bring eternal damnation. Graham’s comments, while blunt, make sense in this framework.

But even one of my professors — a knowledgeable and engaging scholar — decried Graham. This came soon after he’d taught the class the value of using cultural relativism — placing oneself in the mindset of another culture or religion — in order to fully understand it.

This is an example of the unconscious double standard liberals often have — analysts may say America brought last year’s terrorist attacks on itself through short-sighted foreign policy, but Jerry Falwell may not say they were due to American moral decline without getting attacked by media Dobermans.

Ultimately, liberals perceive themselves as intellectually and morally superior to conservatives. Hence my professor’s chagrin at the thought of my being conservative.
If you are so unenlightened as to challenge policies such as affirmative action or large welfare programs, you’ll get either a pitying, long-suffering sigh (“We must educate them”) or emotional bluster (“If you oppose this you are nothing but a racist and big business lackey”). There’s rarely any debate, and this limits true intellectual diversity.

This is why I stepped to the right. So bravo, President Bush. Keep on trucking, Cal Thomas. You make far more sense.

Managing editor Priya Abraham is a graduating senior international communication major from Lusaka, Zambia. She can be reached at (p.m.abraham@tcu.edu).