I always cringed at various anti-discrimination stances taken by law professors when it was apparent that such stances were self-serving.
Unfortunately, my own constitutional law professor Stephen Clark put himself into this position recently, when he selectively chose for his anti-discrimination complaint the "Women's only" viewing of a movie "Wonder Woman" at a theatre in Texas, of all states( Stephen Clark teaches in Albany Law School, New York) - while refusing to fight discrimination instilled by the community that he belongs to, the LGBT community.
Professor Clark, who is an openly gay man, as he advertised in his complaint and subsequent interviews to the press, considered it a violation of men's equal protection rights that a theatre would hold a "women's only" movie viewing - and made a big thing out of it.
Yet, the timing of the complaint is interesting.
The complaint came at a time when colleges across the country, colleges that receive public funds and are prohibited to discriminate on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, are holding separate LGBT graduations - but the good constitutional law professor Stephen Clark is not seen anywhere close to fight that type of discrimination. Is it because he belongs to the LGBT community himself, and one does not foul one's own nest, even if the criticism is fair and necessary?
Is the requirement by black students that white people are absent from college campuses for one day (even though they either have to report to work there, or paid money for their tuition there, or simply want to come to the campus, funded by tax money, as any person has a right o do) not discriminatory? Is it not unlawful?
Wouldn't it be close to home for a white male college professor Stephen Clark?
Why does not professor Clark fight discrimination on campus - discrimination becoming adamant in:
- separate LGBT and black student and faculty-only graduations;
- "Days of Absence";
- infringement on freedom of academic speech?
Why doesn't professor Clark offer public support to professor Weinstein who opposed the "Days of Absence" on campus, as discriminatory and illegal, and became the target of complaints to fire him?
Why doesn't professor Clark criticize Harvard for holding separate graduations for black students - instead complaining against a "women's only" viewing of a movie?
This country has a long history of discrimination against women - and against women in the law, too, and it still continues (even in the U.S. Supreme Court, against female justices), so the theatre could also, same as colleges do, hold separate movie viewings for women, "celebrating their accomplishments", same as colleges do when holding separate graduations for black and LGBT students?
Wouldn't it be on the same grounds that such conduct would be deemed or not deemed illegal discrimination on the basis of gender, race and/or sexual orientation?
Why not fight discrimination against women in your own profession, Professor Clark instead of fighting supposed discrimination against men in a remote movie theatre? To do that would be too close to home? You will lose your job over that? Fighting it in a movie theatre in the remote Texas is safer?
Professor Clark clearly shows that his complaint was not a little bit self-serving and attention seeking when he puts on the pedestal gay bars that, according to him, are an example of tolerance and acceptance of all genders and sexual orientations, even to their own detriment.
Once again, Professor Clark would not see that LGBT community, to which he belongs, is becoming quite aggressive in now not just fighting against discrimination against its members, but insisting on discriminating against everybody else - by arranging for separate graduations for public money, by insisting that toddlers must now be taught about "LGBT issues", for taxpayers' money, which is a direct infringement on parents' constitutional rights to care and control of their kids education.
If you are a parent and teach your child about sex - you may be dragged all the way to court for child abuse by social services, and then be fired from your job, if you work with children or people with disabilities, and blackballed for life.
Yet, if you are teaching those children, for public money, against the wishes of their parents, about "LGBT issues", you are a hero now?
Professor Clark is not the first law professor who is apparently selling his soul to the devil, so to say, endorsing political agenda of the social group he belongs to under the guise of protecting the law and fighting against discrimination. And not the first Albany Law School professor either.
Albany Law professor Ray Brescia's
(who was also my professor, of "legal ethics", a fantastical topic, as I found out later) "advice" to Uber to engage in the "kind of regulation" to avoid the "real regulation" - just as lawyers do, as Professor Brescia advises Uber - was clearly meant to not only advise to Uber, but also to support the ruse of attorney regulation that is presented as protecting consumers, while in fact is keeping the "real" regulation for protection of consumers off bay.
Albany Law professor Timothy Lytton (my professor in Torts),
who is Jewish, extensively writing on sex abuse by Catholic priests as an "institutional failure", while completely ignoring the identical problem of sex abuse in Hasidic schools, or the targeting of the person who exposed such sex abuse in Brooklyn (same as New York lawyer John Aretakis, who was the first lawyer to sue Catholic priests for sex abuse, was suspended, illegally, for the contents of his motion to recuse a judge - and law professor and the advocate anti-sexual abuse by Catholic priests did not publicly take a stand in his defense).
It is disheartening to lose respect to people who were your own former law professors - good professors, as I thought at the time I was going to law school.
It is disheartening to realize that a Constitutional Law professors succumb to the hype of safe self-advertisement to advance a political agenda while cowardly refusing to address issues of discrimination under their own noses, in their own profession and in social groups to which they belong, through their own religion or sexual orientation.
Law professor who are preparing new generations of advocates for the people should not be self-serving cowards.
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