Religion, political correctness, and academic freedom
Interestingly enough one of the initial motivations of the secular movement in the United States was to disengage religion from its oppression of science and reason. Noah Feldman explains:
Two books written in the 1870s and widely read for decades laid the scientific groundwork for American strong secularism as not just an intellectual position but an ideology: Andrew Dickson White's work, The Warfare of Science (1876), which grew out of a lecture first delivered at the Cooper Institute in New York in 1874; and The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, by New York University chemist-turned-historian John William Draper published in 1876. Although neither of these books used the word "secularism," both were serious, systematic efforts by members in good standing of the educational elite to promote reason to the detriment of doctrinal religious faith.Feldman continues, explaining how White teamed up with Ezra Cornell to found Cornell University, the countries first nonsectarian university. This prompted attacks from many in the religious establishment. An exasperated White went on the offensive, defending his approach in a lecture:
In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science; and, on the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good to both of religion and science.Draper took a more decisive view, arguing that religion:
...insisted on divine revelation that "must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction," while [science] represented the "irresistible advance of human knowledge." In this conflict between static religion and dynamic science, Draper wished to take sides. "History shows that, if this be not done, social misfortunes, disastrous and enduring, will ensure." If religion were to win its latest battle against science, Draper argued, a new Dark Age would be sure to follow.Draper and White were two huge forces in the reinvention of American centers of higher learning. Prior, the nation's universities were blatantly religious and the students were taught accordingly. The passion of many academics was exacerbated by the intellectual strides in Germany's largely secular universities in the mid to late nineteenth century. Eventually the academics won out in the battle for America's universities. This prompted the last great wave of university foundings, many of which were based upon the German model (examples include top schools like Washington University in St. Louis, MIT, Cal Tech, Vanderbilt, John Hopkins, USC, Stanford, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Rice, and Carnegie Mellon). Along with this new wave of universities (and greatly reformed old ones like the Ivies) came the modern concept of a professor.
The villain of Draper's piece was the Catholic church...[his] chapters were organized around specific conflicts between the church and science, to devastating effect. The church was shown upholding the flat Earth and the geocentric universe against Copernicus, Galileo, and the circumnavigation of the globe.
The full-time, tenured professor was based upon the German system. The New York Times describes the German model that American academic tenure is based upon: "(the) American academy eventually adopted the German university model, with its research-oriented faculty of experts and the protection of lehrfreiheit, or 'freedom to teach,' without political restraints." At that time the only real political threat to scientific inquiry was the Church.
Over the past century religion has lost its cultural stanglehold. But as the church's prominence fell the scientific community's dream of a world without political constraints did not come true. Instead many proponents of secularism attempted to restrain inquiry into subjects they felt taboo, this movement has become popularly known as political correctness.
Now I am not decrying the entirety of political correctness. Much of the movement has been beneficial to our society, simply encouraging the people to do unto others as you would do have them do unto you. It has made the workplace more comfortable to our increasingly diverse society. But in doing so the movement has adopted certain philosophies that have become just as restrictive to free inquiry as the Church once was.
These philosophies essentially place certain areas completely off limits. In some instances people or events are the untouchable subjects. Other times it is in relation to full philosophical beliefs, most prominent of which is that all people are born equal in ability; that any women is as capable as man, that any race is as capable as any other. Although this is a philosophy that I am particularly sympathetic towards, being wedded to it does nothing but limit the scope of questions science can accurately assess.
When Professor/Blogger Eugene Volokh began discussing sexual orientation because of a recent study with interesting results he said a couple of things people did not like to hear, sparking some controversy. His controversial statements were:
Now, as I've suggested, I don't think there's anything inherently immoral about such attempt to convert people away from purely heterosexual behavior, if they are interested in homosexual behavior, and of course if the "conversion" is done without force, imposition on those who are genuinely too young to decide, and so on. If it weren't for the disproportionate and grave health danger from male homosexual activity, I'd think such encouragement to explore which relationships give people the most happiness would be positively quite good. (Yes, I realize that the danger can be reduced by not engaging in anal sex, always using a condom, not having sex with a partner unless he's been tested and had not had sex for some months before the test, and so on. But most people are not nearly this cautious, and the reality thus remains that, given the vastly disproportionate prevalence of HIV among gays in America today, the greater risk from anal sex, a practice that for understandable reasons many male homosexuals do not want to forego, and the notorious difficulty with getting people to actually practice safe practices — whether aimed at preventing disease or conception — the fact remains that experimenting with male homosexuality is dangerous activity.) Given this danger, I'd prefer that men with bisexual orientations who can be happy with women not experiment with men; but that's a judgment about medical risk, not about the inherent morality of "conversion" attempts, and in any event it doesn't apply to lesbianism.
Nonetheless, if I'm right, then I don't think we should deny that the gay and lesbian movement does aim in part at "converting" people who have a wholly or partly bisexual orientation from a purely heterosexual behavior pattern to one that involves at least some (initially experimental) homosexual behavior.