The Diversity Myth

by David O Sacks

  On a very general level, multiculturalists are seeking to promote two distinct sets of values. Each set has its own points of vulnerability. But the most interesting aspect of these two sets of values is that they are contradictory. One set advocates, with almost religious fervor, the benefits of sexual exploration and, more generally, liberation from traditional Western norms. Another set of values demands prudery and ascetic self-denial, a new kind of Puritanism in many ways more restrictive then the original. While each set of values is flawed in its own way, the more revealing question is why Stanford's leaders simultaneously advocate a theology of liberation and a new Puritanism. At bottom, both sets of multicultural values share a least common denominator, and it is this underlying similarity that resolves the apparent paradox.

  Liberation Theology

  In October of 1993, Jason Allen married Terry Rouman in Stanford's Memorial Church. While the university regularly makes the Church available for the weddings of graduates, their ceremony was something of a first. Jason and Terry are both men.

  “We were kissing and people in the street just stood with their mouths hanging open. Somebody yelled, ‘That's disgusting,’” Allen, smiling, told the Stanford Daily.32 Associate Dean Diana Akiyama, who presided over the Church's first homosexual marriage, explained that her personal decision to conduct the “commitment” ceremony (Memorial Church no longer uses the term “wedding”) was based on her acknowledgement that doing so would be “politically risky, but theologically compelling.”33 Dean Robert Gregg added that the Church staff “wanted to focus on what we were about religiously…. We had talked about what we thought would be the right kind of response in terms of justice, compassion and our service to the community. We agreed that [Terry Rouman and Jason Allen's] relationship warranted that kind of support.”34 The church ceremony made an important political statement, Mr. Rouman explained, because his “non-gay friends would see [the ceremony] as equal to their weddings.”35 Indeed, out of their sympathy with Rouman and Allen's ideological goal, the church's clerics not only ignored the fact that no major religion approves of homosexuality; in their eagerness to complete the ceremony, they also waived regular fees for use of the church (more than $1,000) and bypassed normal procedures (a six-month wait), thereby giving the homosexual pair preferential treatment over a long list of heterosexual couples.36 Dean Akiyama more accurately could have described her support of the ceremony in reverse—theologically risky, but politically compelled.

  The homosexual marriage in Stanford's nondenominational Memorial Church angered a number of religious groups on campus.37 But, for multiculturalists, the choice between insensitivity towards homosexuals and insensitivity towards religious groups is hardly a choice at all. “We had a first,” Akiyama boasted of the ceremony; “there will be a second.”38

  Stanford's first homosexual wedding is only one of a number of cases where multiculturalists privilege the concerns of relatively few homosexuals over those of larger numerical majorities, whether they involve religious groups or the heterosexual student population at large, often in the name of personal liberation:

  The Office of Residential Education aggressively recruits homosexuals for RA positions. Res Ed even advertises in the Stanford Daily for this purpose.39 Director Supton explained that Stanford's residences needed “RA's who will promote openness to issues of sexuality and sexual preference.”40 Ken Ruebush, for instance, stated in his application that he was homosexual and got the job, which pays $4,500 per year (plus free housing).

  The Gay and Lesbian Alliance at Stanford (GLAS) and Res Ed coordinate dorm-based discussions, in which homosexual activists seek to promote “alternative lifestyles.” Every year each freshman dorm is visited by a panel of homosexual speakers, and these panels are almost never balanced by contrasting viewpoints.41 GLAS also holds weekly “Queer Be-Ins” at the Coffee House, in which homosexuals take over the campus's most popular hangout.42

  The University has placed the “Gay Liberation” statue, depicting gays and lesbians caressing each other, near the campus's centrally located Quad.43 By contrast, a statue commemorating Stanford's founding family waits by a dumpster in the university's maintenance yard because “there is no place to put it.” The statue of Leland, Jane, and Leland Jr. Stanford “is not sympathetic to current sensibilities,” said a university curator.44 Indeed, moral sensibilities have not so much changed at Stanford since its founding as have been inverted.

  GLAS receives financial support over and above other organizations. In 1988, the homosexual community was bequeathed its own university-sponsored community center. The Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Center (LGBCC), a department of Student Affairs, receives University funding, staff time, equipment, office space, and the resources of the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs.45

  The university is also willing to tolerate excesses by members of the homosexual community that would never be tolerated in any other group. In men's bathrooms throughout campus, but particularly in libraries and the history department, holes have been drilled between the walls of toilet stalls to facilitate “anonymous bathroom sex.” One Green Library employee described a restroom in the South Stacks of the library as a “horror story,” with homosexual graffiti covering the walls. Students who use these bathrooms are often solicited for homosexual sex.46 David Bianco, a homosexual activist well-known on campus, described one such encounter in a 1990 Stanford Daily article:

  “Doug” was barely a teenager when he saw the man in the next bathroom stall tap his foot. Curious, he tapped his own foot back, and before he knew it, the man had gotten on his knees and was caressing Doug's leg. Although he found his first sexual partner “basically by accident,” Doug, now an undergraduate, looks back at that incident as the first time he was able to express his lifelong attraction toward other men. As Doug grew older, anonymous bathroom sex became an addiction. Whenever he felt he could not “handle it,” he recalls, the following scenario ensued: “I go to this one bathroom and sit in a stall. I tap my foot and wait to see if they tap back, as a signal. Typically Doug and the other man would engage in mutual masturbation and occasionally oral sex underneath the stall. Doug was swamped by emotions each time he had an encounter. “I felt guilty, ashamed, depressed—I was nervous, scared of the danger, angry with myself.” He came to Stanford assuming that the gay community on a college campus would be more open about sexuality and that he could be accepted as a gay man for the first time. He quickly sought counselling and “came out” for the first time.47

  Apparently unwilling to anger members of the homosexual community, the university has failed to reseal “glory holes” in a number of the campus's public bathrooms, despite the discomforting effect on people seeking to use toilets for more prosaic purposes.48

  The university's advocacy of homosexual causes is just one of a larger set of decisions and policies inextricably linked to judgments about personal morality—questions involving interpersonal relationships, family values, and sexual mores. In many ways, the multicultural left has extended the sexual revolution of the 1960s, to the extent that liberation from traditional moral restraints is now exalted as a kind of salvation—hence Dean Robert Gregg's assertion that the homosexual marriage “focus[ed] on what we were about religiously.” Traditional notions of morality are at best passé and at worst oppressive, multiculturalists have concluded, because the people who invented these norms failed to consider the special needs of minorities with “alternative lifestyles.”

  A central tenet of the new liberation theology, illustrated by the account of “Doug,” is that guilty feelings are much worse than the acts provoking them. Multiculturalists eschew guilt as the consequence of an incomplete liberation from Western biases. In the name of freeing individuals from these oppressive restrictions (so that people can finally “be themselves” and “do their own thing”), multiculturalists have eliminated traditional male-female distinctions and declared that other sexual restraints have got to go. One university res
idence now even has coed group showers, for instance, and the University's Tuesday Night Flicks shows a number of X-rated movies, including the sadistic Salo, which is advertised as one of the most disturbing films ever made and features torture and child molestation.49

  To facilitate the new morality, Stanford funds numerous contraceptive “education” programs. The AIDS Education Project promotes the “Safer Sex Shoppe,” which sells students contraceptives and gives many more away for free at dorm-based “RubberWare” parties, in which students are encouraged to “play” and “experiment” with various kinds of sexual devices.50 In 1987, the Project distributed 9,000 condoms in two hours.51 The Cowell Student Health Center also distributed condoms subsidized by the Stanford administration and student government, and, in conjunction with Stanford's psychology department, the Center taught students to become “Contraceptive Peer Counselors” for academic credit.52 Both the AIDS Education Project and the Cowell Center justified their subsidies on the disingenuous grounds that many students could not afford to pay the market price of 50¢ a condom.53 In 1988, Res Ed also set up condom dispensing machines in every dormitory.54 These machines were not particularly successful, though; most students could get contraceptives for free elsewhere.55

  Just in case these “education” efforts are insufficient, however, there is also the “Condom Rating Contest.” This annual event distributes packets of condoms to students, along with pamphlets and ballots.56 In 1989, student organizer Daniel Bao claimed that “people are going to have sex anyway. It's like handing out shoes to people who don't have them…. If people insist on being sexually active, then we should be sensitive to that and advise protection.”57 The details of the contest, however, suggest that it involves more than a welfare-like distribution of condoms “to people who don't have them.” The pamphlet exhorted the contestants to “try out these condoms by yourself, with a partner, or partners. Be creative. Have fun. Enjoy.” The ballot asked participants to rate each of seven condoms by smell, taste (Bao: “Some people like to taste them”), appearance, sensualness/comfort, lubrication, and sense of security. Even on a very superficial level, such “festive foolery” goes well beyond merely educating people about contraceptive options.58

  Ostensibly, multicultural sex education is predicated on the notion that there are vast numbers of people who are sexual ignoramuses. In the case of AIDS, some multiculturalists actually suggest that the absence of their education will cause people to die unnecessarily. These claims notwithstanding, the truth of the matter is that very few of today's college-age Americans do not know how women become pregnant or how people may contract AIDS—and those few who do not know these things are definitely not attending Stanford. Hence, if the only purpose of these “awareness” campaigns were to “educate,” they would not really be necessary. Efforts like the “Condom Rating Contest” have a very different goal, however. Despite claims of value neutrality, their purpose is to promote a very specific set of values. For instance, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Michael Ramsey-Perez, an admitted homosexual, declared that “abstinence is simply not a viable option, nor has it ever been…. A condom, used properly and in conjunction with spermicides, is about as safe as you're going to get.”59 When the university promotes casual sex and an assistant dean refuses to recognize alternatives, the net effect is to declare that conceptions of sexual conduct that do not conform to the new liberation theology are wrong.

  It is worth noting that all of these efforts have not had a positive impact on the level of AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, or abortions at Stanford, relative to American society at large. More than 100 Stanford women still have unwanted pregnancies each year, of which about 90 percent end in abortion. The resulting abortion rate at Stanford is about twice the national average.60 And as for AIDS, the rate of death at Stanford is perhaps four to five times that of the relatively “uneducated” society at large.61

  In addition to the sexual mores of the 1960s, the multiculturalists have, in many cases, also embraced that generation's liberated attitudes towards drug use. To take but one of the more blatant examples: In 1991, the Bridge, Stanford's counselling center, hosted a two-day conference entitled “Linking the Past, Present and Future of Psychedelics.” But instead of advising students about the dangers of drug use, this conference celebrated the drug counterculture of the 1960s. Attendees were greeted by television monitors filled with swirling patterns, videos created specifically to stimulate visual sensations during LSD trips.62 Booths in the lobby offered drug-inspired art and distributed articles advocating the use of drugs. One of the pieces indicated that “hemp [can] be used as an alternative fuel source, thus ending the American dependence on foreign oil.”63

  Drug gurus Timothy Leary and Robert Wilson promoted the salutary effects of psychedelic drugs with even greater conviction. Lecturing the 500-person audience, Wilson held up an apple and declared, “This is your brain.” He subsequently dropped the apple, adding, “This is your brain after it's been hit by stupid uninformed TV commercials on drugs.”64 Timothy Leary attempted to provide more of a philosophical grounding:

  The use of hallucinogens was suppressed in feudal society because [knowledge of the power of the mind gained through psychedelic drugs] is incompatible with a society that depends on there being one God…. The whole theory of “know thyself” came from a bunch of Greek philosophers hanging around and getting high. They had a lot of secret rituals that involved psychedelic plants.65

  Leary argued that contemporary use of illegal drugs is a critical ingredient of a therapeutic “shamanistic environment.” More specifically, Leary suggested that such an environment should consist of people using “LSD and ecstasy to set up a hypnotic trance state, and then listen and dance to music for five or six hours. Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll—that's what it's all about.”66 One may only speculate about what kinds of advice the Bridge offers students behind closed doors.

  An indispensable ingredient of the multicultural theology of liberation includes the liberation from Western religion and its mores. This liberation takes many forms, but as with the CIV reading list, the unifying theme involves the yearning for a new religion to replace the old. This new religion may involve little more than an ideological commitment to social or political trends, as in the case of the homosexual wedding. In other instances, however, the discomfort with traditional religious expression becomes more explicit, as the new multicultural religion becomes transformed into a religion of antireligiosity.

  A good example involves the transformation of Stanford's church. Memorial Church reopened in the fall of 1992, after earthquake repairs, as a very different institution. The university failed to replace the Bibles, which had been removed—leaving empty holders on the backs of 100-plus pews.67 Money was not the problem—the extensive renovation had cost millions of dollars, the custom-made wooden chairs in the side chapel cost about $1,500 apiece, and the church also had bought an expensive new speaker system. Nor were the books even damaged in the earthquake. The church staff simply believed that, while homosexual marriages were “theologically compelling,” Bibles were not. Although the church retains stained-glass windows depicting Christ and some of the Christian saints, the church's leadership is not entirely comfortable with that remaining vestige either: One speaker devoted a sermon to denouncing these icons on the grounds that they made the church less inclusive.68 In a few years, at this rate, the church may experience a fate similar to that of many such buildings in the former Eastern Bloc: a sports auditorium, a repository for condom dispensing machines, or perhaps a museum of multiculturalism.69

  Memorial Church's new mission focuses on social and political work, pursued with evangelical zeal—for example, writing sexual harassment policies on campus, organizing divestment efforts from South Africa, and providing sanctuary for potential conscientious objectors during the Persian Gulf War.70 The new religion comes complete with new rites, totems, and holy places—and even pilgrimages to visit some of these places. In 1987, for
instance, Thomas Ambrogi, then Acting Dean of the Church, in conjunction with the Reverend Herb Schmidt, the official campus Lutheran pastor, and graduate student Emily Goldfarb, organized a trip to reconstruct the National University in El Salvador, which had been damaged by an earthquake several months earlier. Stanford's Public Service Center helped 14 student participants raise $1,000 each, advertised as covering the costs of travel, room, board, and reconstruction materials. AGEUS, a student group with links to the Marxist FMLN guerrillas, who were then attempting to overthrow the Salvadoran government, hosted the Stanford delegation.71 During the 10-day trip, the only earthquake relief occurred during a lunch break by regular construction workers; according to one participant, it was “little more than a photo opportunity.”72 Many of the student participants were genuinely surprised by this turn of events, as they had expected to do real relief work. Instead, they received a series of one-sided presentations, given by AGEUS, on the political situation in El Salvador. Law professor Thomas McBride summarized what happened: “The educational purposes of the trip may have been affected by efforts to indoctrinate or use the Stanford students as a propaganda symbol.”73

  The efforts of the official campus ministry closely resemble the social engineering pushed through the curriculum and Residential Education. A similar fanaticism seems to animate all of these drives; the only difference, perhaps, is that the religious dimension becomes more explicit in the case of Memorial Church's clerics. But even in the case of Stanford's nonclerical multiculturalists, the degree of ideological commitment seems to require something like a religious leap of faith.

  The push for the new anti-Western religion extends well beyond Memorial Church. Every year, the holiday season becomes the occasion for a ritualized attack on Western religious traditions. Stanford Daily columnist Ashley Ryan's invocations about the evils of Christmas trees were not atypical: