I am sad to say that I attended a meeting this morning where I proposed a walkout of my own commencement ceremony. Our Dean, Evan Caminker, oblivious to the needs of his own students, has invited Rob Portman to speak at our Senior Day. Rob Portman is a distinguished alumnus of our fine institution, the junior Senator from Ohio, and, of course, a raging homophobe. Senator Portman:
- Voted YES on Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage.
- Voted YES on banning gay adoptions in DC.
- Supports a continued ban on gay people serving in the military.
Of course, this doesn't even get to his stances against affirmative action (which Michigan Law School went to the Supreme Court to save, you might recall), his belief that women should not control their own bodies, and his global warming denial. That last point is at least equal opportunity death to us all... We're not addressing these things because for some reason, being against affirmative action is not considered racism in mainstream discourse, being anti-choice is thought to be a legitimate opinion, and being anti-science is somehow legitimate as well. However, most people can agree that denying basic human rights to LGBT people is beyond the pale.
The students here are livid, and with good reason. Our first response was a letter to the adminsitration that circulated to all the third year students and received 98 signatures, over a third of those graduating next month. Above The Law has been printing the whole saga, so I'll link there for the text of the actual letter. The main points, though, are (and I'm paraphrasing):
- We don't think that we should be honoring someone who would deny basic rights to a large portion of the graduating class.
- We do not oppose him because he is a Republican, but only because he is a bigot.
I think we all knew that if Dean Caminker was going to defend this, he would issue this kind of statement. He was going to play the intellectual diversity card. He was going to try to cast his own protesting LGBT students as people who don’t support that kind of diversity. He was going to bring up some Democrat to make it look like this is an issue of partisan squabbling instead of a question of basic human rights. He was going to say Michigan is committed to being “inclusive” in the very same message he was using to support a divisive speaker. We knew he was going to tell LGBT members of his campus that they are welcome at Michigan just so long as they sit quietly when occasionally the school invites somebody who hates them to come speak to them.Elie's exactly right, and naturally this pushes my typical "First Amendment sloganeering" buttons, with which any reader of this blog is familiar. As I said in my first sentence, there is a difference between respecting a right to have a viewpoint, and honoring it. This is the latter, and it is an undeserved honor.
...
But what Dean Caminker really doesn’t get — what scores and scores of moderates and even general liberals don’t always get — is that the similar speaker to the Rob Portmans of the world isn’t someone like Valerie Jarrett; it’s David Duke. It’s Louis Farrakhan. Now if Dean Caminker wants to say that Michigan Law is a community where Farrakhan’s virulently Anti-Semitic rhetoric can be discussed with “respectful conversation and debate,” fine. I’m sure that’d be an interesting symposium. But I doubt, I highly doubt, Dean Caminker is going to be putting in a call to Louis Farrakhan with an invite to speak at graduation! This isn’t some kind of lecture series where students are showing up for free pizza, this is part of his students’ graduation celebration — and it’s supposed to be a celebration for gay students too.
But see, Dean Caminker doesn’t think of Rob Portman like he thinks of Louis Farrakhan. He thinks that the anti-gay-marriage people are just one of many co-equal viewpoints. This guy doesn’t like gay marriage, that guy doesn’t like the New York Yankees. Whatever, we can all talk about this like adults.
Of course, as Elie also notes, this is particularly bad timing to bring in a homophobe speaker, given the Andrew Shirvell incident that also occurred this school year at Michigan.
I will not stand to listen to a homophobe tell me at my graduation that I have the whole world at my disposal, my whole life ahead of me, when he would deny access to a basic part of that world and a basic part of that life to a large portion of my class, my family, and my friends. I will not hear Senator Portman's speech because I will not sit for it. Nor will I be shaking his hand at graduation. I would rather walk out of my own graduation ceremony for which I have waited three long, hard years. I do not yet know how many of my classmates will join me. I can only hope that it doesn't come to that, and either Senator Portman or Dean Caminker manages to rectify the situation so that we can all enjoy what should be a celebratory day.
UPDATE (5/3): The walkout is on. I will likely write more about this at a later time - I'm organizing a walkout and trying to finish finals right now. The administration began at a place where this was just another acceptable political issue, and Dean Caminker has made clear that he's started to learn that a large portion of our class and our generation feels that is not the case. In the future, there will be student involvement in picking graduation speakers, and it's very unlikely this incident will be repeated for a good long while. I'd say that's a decent victory for now. All that's left is showing everyone involved how unified we are in this as we walk out.
