HOW COLLEGE MADE ME MORE CONSERVATIVE PART 1 of 2

 

 

 

Rudy Takala
January 5, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

Not much time remains until presidential candidates are nominated (at least informally), and Christmas has served as a brief interlude to the frenetic political season. There are a lot of things going on that could serve as fodder for a commentary. But with the sense of divine serenity that accompanies the Christmas season, one issue seems particularly compelling to me.

As I approach the conclusion of my time in college, I look back on the years I’ve spent witnessing a wasteland that can emblemize the product of secular liberalism with no greater purity. Before I began, I wasn’t a firm adherent to any particular side of the culture war. I opposed government interventionism that favored anyone. I tended libertarian.

I still believe that libertarianism is the ideal political philosophy. It’s fair to everyone. It rewards people according to their worth rather than according to a dictator’s moral judgment of their worth.

But it cannot succeed when only one side is willing to play by the rules. Secular “progressives” want to destroy everything that has been considered the American way of life. They want to transform what has been the American value system for over two centuries.

I could provide five anecdotal examples of their moral impositions for every day I’ve been in college, but I will refrain from what would be a redundant detailing. But it has reinforced something about which I was skeptical; that many professors really teach for no other reason than to indoctrinate.

In Dinesh D’Souza’s book “What’s So Great About Christianity,” he writes about the effort to inculcate students with a belief in atheism. He references the philosopher Richard Rorty, who died earlier this year, and who argued that professors in universities ought to “arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”

Rorty noted that students are “lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [dominion] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents. I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”

D’Souza also mentioned currently-living psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who wrote that “Parents… have no god-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrows paths of their own faith.”

Enthusiastic students entering college for the first time, who, unlike me, haven’t spent a decade learning how to articulate their beliefs – or who, in my experience, don’t have much in the way of beliefs – are easy to influence. They’re eager to understand what it means to be educated, and are ready to accept the philosophies of atheism and big-government socialism in order to be seen as “fashionable.” The alternative is to face scorn and ridicule.

Before I began in college, I was libertarian on the marriage issue. If anything, I believed it was a thing to be left to the states. And states would be better left leaving it alone rather than intruding on what should be a matter for the church.

But that was before I spent three years dealing with teachers explaining that we must accept homosexuality in order to be “tolerant,” of being required to take their classes in order to get the “gender” designation required to graduate, and of seeing my student fees go to homosexual activist groups while Christian groups were barred from having similar funds for being “intolerant.”

Today I am unequivocally in favor of a marriage amendment at both the state and national levels. This isn’t about allowing people to live as they wish. It’s about reaffirming democracy. In a democracy, everyone is given a chance to vote, and the majority prevails.

We do not have an oligarchy, in which an elite few impose their values on the majority. But unless they are stopped, that is exactly what “progressive” elitists are going to do.

For some, college is a necessity. But only about 30% of American adults have attended college -- and I would argue that the 70% who have not had to deal with this valueless, ideological whorehouse are all that has kept this nation from falling into the abyss of despotism.

© 2008 Rudy Takala - All Rights Reserved