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Ryan T. Anderson’s Dangerous Mind

The Princeton graduate, Heritage Foundation fellow, Catholic intellectual and philosophically-inclined opponent of same-sex marriage is too much of a threat to the unweaned neurasthenics at The Palo Alto School For Tots Stanford University. Excerpt from the student newspaper: Last Wednesday evening, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) denied funding for an event hosted by the Stanford […]

The Princeton graduate, Heritage Foundation fellow, Catholic intellectual and philosophically-inclined opponent of same-sex marriage is too much of a threat to the unweaned neurasthenics at The Palo Alto School For Tots Stanford University. Excerpt from the student newspaper:

Last Wednesday evening, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) denied funding for an event hosted by the Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) following community outcry over alleged “anti-LGBT” content.

SAS’s April conference, titled “Communicating Values,” has a two-fold purpose, according to SAS president Judith Romea ’14, between educating attendees on the public policy issues surrounding marriage and family and exploring how media, entertainment and technology can be used to better facilitate the communication underlying marriage and the family.

SAS had sought $600 in honoraria funds from the GSC for conference speakers. However, members of GradQ, the queer graduate student organization, criticized the speaker list–which included Robert Lopez, Kellie Fiedorek and Ryan Anderson–as inappropriately controversial.

Bringing the speakers to Stanford would threaten the safety of campus for the queer population, according to Brianne Huntsman ’15, who started a Facebook event to organize a rally at the GSC meeting on Wednesday night.

“A lot of students who are queer come to Stanford because it’s one of the most LGBT-friendly places in the world,” Huntsman said. “I grew up in Utah, where it was really conservative and a lot of us come from similar backgrounds, and we feel that we every time we go home. Stanford is supposed to be a safe space for us.”

Oh dear. Somebody didn’t like living in Provo. I suppose you have to go to a place as prestigious as Stanford to learn that having to hear arguments you don’t want to hear threatens your physical safety. And the student government at an actual university, where bona fide grown-ups pay lots of money to receive an education, agreed with this anti-intellectual nonsense.

Anderson is going to speak there anyway; the money was a standard request by a student group to help defer the cost of hotels and airfare for the speakers at an event — in this case, a conference put on by the Stanford Anscombe Society, a student organization named after English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, and dedicated to advancing discussion around the principles underlying traditional marriage, family, and teaching on sexuality. This is another useful opportunity to observe that Error Has No Rights, not even at Stanford. Like Anderson said on Twitter, “Welcome to the new normal.”

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