A funny thing happened on the way down the slippery slope at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: someone dared utter, “STOP!”
Father Robert A. Wild, president of the university, rescinded the offer of a deanship made to Dr. Jodi O’Brien, currently a professor of sociology at Seattle University. Why? A quick glance at O’Brien’s curriculum vitae pretty well answers the question. Some highlights: How Big is Your God? Queer Christian Social Movements; Seeking Normal? Considering Same Sex Marriage; Wrestling the Angel of Contradiction: Queer Christian Identities; “Do it on the Web" Emerging Discourses on Internet Sexuality; Phone Sex, Fantasy and Disembodiment.
Oddly Wild felt that perhaps the author of such material might not be the best person to publically represent the 119 year old Catholic institution’s College of Arts and Sciences, the largest of the university.
Naturally all hell has broken loose.
Charges of homophobia (had we mentioned O’Brien is a lesbian?), sexism, intolerance, and injustice swarm like locusts. Legal complications regarding the botched handling of the offer process have defenders of Wild and the university laying low. And fingers are pointing in all directions as to how the offer was ever made in the first place.
Behold the fruits of political-correctness. Marquette, like nearly every other institution of higher learning in America, has long been bending over backwards to appease the ever-increasingly preposterous demands of the champions of that which is politically fashionable: gay rights, multiculturalism and, of course, “social justice.” That among these champions—many of whom are in positions of considerable influence—are some who, by their efforts, seek not to further Marquette’s Catholic Jesuit mission but to destroy it, has likely never occurred to university leadership. Perhaps now it has.
Would that this awakening and subsequent attempts to gain footing so far down the post-Vatican II free fall proves not only successful, but seminal to the Church’s long lonely climb back to Catholicism.
Cheers,
Charlie
