In a so-called Faith & Reason lecture delivered to the entire student body today, Patrick Henry College Professor Stephen Baskerville claimed that “homosexual activists” played an integral role in the rise of Nazism.
I find it hard to understand how any academic could retain any shred of self-respect after implying that the Nazis and queer people were bosom buddies. This chart, for example, lays out the various triangular Nazi concentration camp badges that were used to categorize Jews, sexual offenders (which were primarily gay men), the Romani people, and those who were mentally ill, among many others.
This quote was only one of many similarly inaccurate and deeply offensive statements delivered in the course of the lecture, the text of which is about 25 pages. Baskerville, who has made a career of railing against the “divorce regime” after a messy divorce in his own past, warned the student body against adopting a “theology of resentment.”
He also said that the AIDS epidemic has been exacerbated by “sexual ideologues, who sabotage effective campaigns for abstinence and fidelity in favor of ideologically inspired but useless condom distributions, resulting in further spread of the disease and millions of needless deaths.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Distributing condoms spreads AIDS.
This sort of lying and misinformation is malicious and irresponsible. If someone chooses to be abstinent, that’s their business, but they shouldn’t be made to feel as though they invite death if they choose to be sexually active. In addition, calling safe sex campaigns a form of “sabotage” is ridiculous. The ability to know about and practice safe sex does not take away your ability to practice abstinence if you so choose. Instead, it provides you with more options.
Baskerville spews classic MRA and queer panic rhetoric for much of the lecture. He puts words like “rape” and domestic “violence” and “child abuse” in quotation marks, to suggest that straight cis men and fathers are being persecuted in a witch hunt full of supposedly false accusations.
I’d like to say that I’m surprised that these sorts of comments are coming from a PHC leader, but I went to school there for four years. I heard rape victims referred to as manipulating liars, I was told that children’s rights was a ploy to take children away from their parents, and feminists were dismissed as ugly people who couldn’t get dates. So no, it doesn’t surprise me that a PHC professor would say these things, or that he would be met with thunderous applause.
But I do wish that Patrick Henry College valued reputable academic research and healthy discourse over demagoguery and targeted attacks. That Baskerville is even employed at PHC, given the poor quality of his research and rhetoric, let alone allowed to represent the college in a campus-wide lecture given to the entire student body, shows how little the school respects academic disciplines and its own students.
September 13, 2013 at 11:13 pm
Any chance you have the full text you could post?
September 13, 2013 at 11:46 pm
Working on that! It’s a large file, so it’s taking awhile.
September 13, 2013 at 11:23 pm
Not surprising. While I don’t have any documentation, I remember a PHC chapel session, sometime between 2001 and 2005, in which the (then) president trotted out the hateful old myth that gay men are child molesters. I wish I’d had the ovaries to walk out.
September 19, 2013 at 2:57 pm
How many of the Catholic Priests found to be child molesters were gay?
Most of them!
September 24, 2013 at 6:09 pm
Not according to the official report commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and conducted by John Jay College:
“The clinical data do not support the hypothesis that priests with a homosexual identity or those who committed same-sex sexual behavior with adults are significantly more likely to sexually abuse children than those with a heterosexual orientation or behavior.”
September 14, 2013 at 12:15 am
So after I dropped out, I haven’t paid that much attention to PHC. I didn’t particularly pay that much attention to it while I was there, and my beliefs were rather different then to boot. Have they just gotten crazier, or am I just more aware of it now?
September 14, 2013 at 12:39 am
Thank you for posting the Nazi posters. “Never Forget!” On Yom Kippur (now), Jews practice repentance and forgiveness. We don’t lash out and play “victim.” We take responsibility.
I can understand your outrage. Dr. Baskerville was in full-metal-jacket-mode. I found the whole thing surreal. I’m still digesting it. David and I haven’t had time to discuss.
I was heartened by the mention of “community” by one of the faculty members during the panel discussion. I was also heartened by the inability of the panel to answer the question:
“How do we recognize legitimate grievances….?”
Psalm 8:2, Matt 21:16
September 14, 2013 at 1:42 am
Jonathan, Thank you for your comment. I also found it surreal. I found myself struggling with feelings of both anger and horror. It was hard to even string sentences together in responding to it, because his comments were just so terrible.
September 19, 2013 at 3:05 pm
Wow! How hilarious is this? So much feigned outrage against truth.
September 14, 2013 at 12:07 pm
Your critique would be a lot more helpful if you addressed his claims with evidence that they were wrong, rather than simply making emotional appeals…but after reading this blog in its entirety, I guess that’s asking too much.
September 14, 2013 at 3:28 pm
And it would have been nice if the original lecture had backed up his outlandish claims with any sort of evidence at all that he was right, but I guess we can’t have everything in life.
September 19, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Baskervilles’ claims weren’t wrong, and that’s what ticks off the complainers.
They hate to face the truth. So they attack the messenger.
September 14, 2013 at 9:22 pm
“‘rape’ that includes consensual relations and in most instances is no more than that”
Wow. So… was he present for all of those “consensual relations” so he could make that call? I’m shocked, saddened, and disgusted.
September 19, 2013 at 3:16 pm
You obviously didn’t understand the context of the line you quote, and therefore took out of context. Maybe Stephen needs to dumb-down his lectures to reach the intellectually challenged morally challenged.
September 15, 2013 at 2:32 pm
The critique by David Sessions easily takes apart this fact- and logic-free lecture as an embarrassing disgrace to PHC. My favorite part may be Baskerville’s unique understanding of ideology.
“Considering that the bulk of the lecture is devoted to alarmism about abstract enemies, the irony of its framing is impossible to overstate: an essay against ideology that is an ideological screed par excellence.”
Thank you Kate and David for having the fortitude to write something so quickly. The lecture was so offensive and poorly argued that I’m still a little in shock.
September 16, 2013 at 11:10 pm
THIS is what passes for “faith and reason” at PHC these days? Ugh. I mean, PHC had major issues when I was there, but we did NOT get this kind of blatant rape denial, misogyny, and homophobia. PHC was hyper-conservative for sure, but at least the Faith & Reason lectures were, you know, academic lectures — not hate-filled diatribes. (Though, of course, even in my day there was some pretty homophobic stuff in some of the class materials. Budzizewski, anyone?)
I know people who are survivors of sexual assault, and it’s statistically probable that some audience members were survivors. It makes me sick that students had to sit through something so potentially triggering. And it makes me sick to think that there were LGBTQ students who had to sit through this awful “lecture” as well (hey, I can use scare quotes too!). The whole thing is just appalling.
September 19, 2013 at 3:35 pm
Hate-filled diatribes?? Really?? Blatant rape denial? Just for telling the truth? Does twisted gender identity also screw up your ability to think and reason logically? The context of Baskerville’s remarks, which you conveniently omit, is the high rate of FALSE rape accusations, and the expansion of the definition of rape to suit political ends and ideologies. Are you all so twisted that you FAVOR permitting false accusations to stand and be prosecuted as real? Would YOU like to be falsely accused of, and punished for, something?
September 17, 2013 at 2:08 am
Full textnof speech is here: http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/168175446
September 19, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Pansexual and genderqueer. Necessarily you get excite when someone makes a link betwen Nazism and homosexuality. But this is a matter for open-minded historical research.
Hitler was gay. Gregor Strasser was gay, too. Goebbels wasn’t.