There’s a great scene in Annie Hall in which Woody Allen’s character digs himself out of a hole with a college girl he’s chatting up by saying, “Right, I’m a bigot — but I’m a bigot for the Left.” That came to mind when I read a newspaper report out of Canada, about an all-female panel of women academics talking about how women must be allowed to speak first in classrooms. Excerpt:

Her idea that women should always speak first in classroom discussions and at public events was brought up several times during the forum.

Haiven said she already tries to apply this idea in her own classroom.

“(In) the management department, women get to speak first. I think that that is a primary issue that we actually have to look at, how to do question and answer (periods). And we can start today.”

But even that is not enough for one panelist:

Jude Ashburn agreed with Haiven.

“I think that women of colour should speak first in class,” Ashburn said after the panel discussion.

Ashburn is an outreach co-ordinator for South House, a gender and sexual resource centre in Halifax, and identifies as a “non-binary trans person.”

“When I do activist circles or workshops, I often say, ‘OK, if you’re white and you look like me and you raise your hand, I’m not going to pick on you before someone of colour.’ So I do give little disclaimers, like people of colour will have priority, or if you’re a person with a disability, you’re pushed to the front … I mean, you know, bros fall back,” Ashburn said with a laugh.

Wow. Stellar.

What’s especially funny about this is that when we lived in Brooklyn from 1999-2003, and our son Matthew was little-bitty, my wife caught hell from other moms on the playground when she would tell Matt to “let girls go first” on the slide and the swingset. The Southern code of good manner with which we were raised, and with which we were raising our son, was considered sexist and condescending by these moms. Gosh, what we didn’t know was that we were actually on the cutting edge of empowerment. If only Julie had said to those gripey playground moms, “Oh, we’re bigots, but we’re bigots for the Left,” she might have gotten a pass.

We see here another example of liberalism pretending to be neutral, but in fact being more prejudicial than the thing it is attempting to supplant. If I were a male student, I would worry greatly about my grades in these women professors’ classes. On evidence presented in this news story, those teachers are bigots — but bigots for the cultural left, so they don’t have to worry.

By the way, can anybody think of a less humorous occurrence than a Canadian academic conference on misogyny? It’s like the black hole into which all humor and irony goes to die.