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When I first came to Hillsdale, I, too, held
anti-homosexual prejudices, though I never drew
coercive implications from them. If you are
interested in the shift in my views from 2005 to
2008, look up “Homosexuality:
A Chosen Harm” and “Why
the Right Should Stop Attacking Homosexuality.”
As often happens with intellectual evolution,
seedlings of doubt sprouted over time as I met
respectable homosexuals, pondered the full
implications of individual rights and dignity in
a social context, and became ever more
intolerant of religious intolerance. But the
tipping point came when my future wife and I sat
in a café with one of my best friends from high
school. After we told him of our engagement, he
also had an announcement to make: he was gay.
And it was then that I had the startling
realization… that absolutely nothing had
changed. He was still the same person I had
known for seven years, and he had been gay all
along. Would I have preferred that he had not
let me know, that he had stayed “in the closet”—forced to decide between jeopardizing a
friendship and concealing an important and
meaningful part of his identity? What sort of
self-respecting person would subject another to
such an odious double bind, and himself to
willful ignorance? Reality brooks no
contradictions, so something in my outlook had
to change. I chose to change my views on
homosexuality.
Hillsdale’s new policy would not give other
students this same opportunity on campus.
Ultimately, one can look at people in two ways:
as individuals, or as “the other”; as complex,
creative, deeply meaningful, and unique
self-contained worlds, or as stereotyped
caricatures. Hillsdale’s new policy embraces the
collectivistic view of homosexuality as
uniformly repugnant and contrary to morality. It
represents a paradigm of thinking whose time had
passed ever since a little recent episode known
as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers
questioned established norms and used reason to
strive toward a political and moral order that
respects the dignity of the individual. The
consequences were the liberation of slaves, the
recognition of women’s individual rights, the
dwindling of xenophobia and religious
persecution, the acceptance of interracial
marriages, and, in our time, the increasing
understanding of homosexuals as human beings
with the same rights and dignity as the rest of
us. Hillsdale’s policy puts it squarely on the
wrong side of history. In twenty years, it will
be seen as a shameful blot on the college’s
history and reputation. Many Hillsdale alumni,
myself included, already see it that way. How
could a college that pioneered in advancing the
education of African-Americans and women have
joined the old guard of intolerance after 160
years?
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