Theatre Kids Do What Theatre Kids Do

 

A scene from [REDACTED]

We could all use a little good news once in a while, and it sure isn’t going to come from the pair of prancing and prevaricating plutocrats in Washington.  Luckily, there’s this.

When last we checked in on the theatre program at Santa Rosa High School in California, they’d recently had their production of Dog Sees God shut down by school officials who trembled at the wrath of Anonymous Whiny Folks.  There’s unpleasantness in that play, after all: substance abuse, homophobia, teen violence, isolation, eating disorders… all that nasty stuff that teenagers understand all too well because they and their friends are grappling with those issues. 

As Curmie said in the earlier piece, he doesn’t think it’s a great play, or, frankly, even a good one.  But you know what, Gentle Reader?  That doesn’t matter.  Curmie will probably skip going to the current production at the university from which he is now well and truly retired.  Why?  Because he’s not the target audience, wouldn’t catch all the references, and would not only be miserable himself but would run the risk of spoiling the evening for other spectators.  Similarly, Dog Sees God resonates with people a quarter of Curmie’s age a lot more than it does with him.  That’s absolutely no problem.

Anyway, if there’s anything a half century of working on shows has taught Curmie, it’s that theatre kids are a resilient lot, quite familiar with problem-solving, and they enjoy little if anything more than sticking to who we in our generation called The Man.  That was true when Curmie was one of them, and it’s true today.  So what did the Santa Rosa kids do?  They couldn’t do their show on campus, so they packed up their stuff, booked a space a few miles away, and packed the auditorium with enthusiastic theatre-goers.  Twice.

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, WAIT!  THAT’S NOT ALL!  That brouhaha was in mid-November.  By January, those kids, working with their director, Jerome Anglin, and with Brent Lindsay, artistic director of the Imaginists theater company in Santa Rosa, had written a freaking musical, [REDACTED], about their experience.  And they entered it in the Lenaea Festival, a huge convention/competition that draws entrants from some 70 (!) high school programs.  As one does.  (Don’t get ahead of me here, Gentle Reader, even if you’re pretty sure you know what’s coming.)

Curmie presumes the festival is named for the similarly named event in Ancient Athens which was notable primarily for its stagings of Old Comedy plays (satirical works by the likes of Aristophanes); it also took place in the winter, which may or may not be relevant here.  Curmie won’t bore you with more theatre history, Gentle Reader, except to note that [REDACTED] is the kind of fare that would have fit in nicely with the Lenaea Festival of the 5^th century BCE.

One suspects that [REDACTED] isn’t going to supplant Lysistrata or The Frogs (both of which premiered at the other Lenaea Festival) in the dramatic lit anthologies, but with the Mommies Against the Arts chanting, “Protecting kiddies is our duty! / We cancel anything that smells a little fruity!” and defending school officials, “particularly those who make over $200,000 a year,” it certainly seems to have captured the iconoclastic irreverence of Old Comedy.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the troupe received the Spirit of Lenaea Award.  The festival of a couple of millennia ago would have been an appropriate venue, and its 21^st-century descendent seems to be so, as well.  Board director Cheena Moslen said, “This group refused to be silenced. They mobilized their community, pushed back against censorship driven by fear, and ultimately staged their production, selling out performances. But that hurdle seems to be the beginning of a larger issue of silencing and oppression.”

It’s interesting, too, that according to Anglin that particular award generally goes to an individual rather than a group, but it was the entire company who shared this prize.  Santa Rosa also won a dozen other awards, including the Gold Medal (Curmie isn’t sure what that means, but it sure sounds impressive, right?) and a host of individual awards; there are awards for songs, scenes, monologues, etc.

Curmie has never been a fan of awards in the arts.  He pays even a little attention to awards shows only when he knows someone whose project has been nominated.  But sometimes those awards serve a purpose.  High school theatre programs in Curmie’s adopted state of Texas are generally better (and much better funded) than they were at Curmie’s previous stops in other states.  That’s because you can win trophies in it, and school adminstrators love to brag, even if it isn’t about anything they really care about (cough… football… cough).

And, lo and behold, the district—the same folks (with the exception of a new principal) who shut down Dog Sees God—are now strutting around praising these kids.  District public information officer James Hodgman saw a preview performance of [REDACTED].  “It is clear the students wanted to be heard on any possible censorship, and the play is based on some things that happened in recent memory,” he said. “At the district level, we are working to prevent something like that happening again.”  Curmie notes the ambiguity of that demonstrative pronoun.  Does “that” refer to the censorship or to the students’ having the audacity to believe they should be heard?

That new principal, Monica Fong, had questioned some of the monologues students intended to perform at the Lenaea Festival; Anglin invited her to a rehearsal, but she “didn’t really have much of a response to it,” and the play was not approved by the administration.  Now, of course, it’s “We would like to congratulate the ArtQuest Theatre group from Santa Rosa High School for awards received at the Lenaea Festival.  Congratulations to the students and all of the teachers that made these awards possible.”  Uh huh.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse watch a lot of old cop shows on Hulu, Amazon, Britbox, etc.  Not infrequently, some antagonist tries pushing our hero or heroine around.  They’re not our hero and heroine by accident; we know they’re going to win in the end.  And Curmie finds himself talking to the TV, saying, “Don’t fuck with [insert name here].”

School administrators, boards of education, and anyone else who seeks to censor free expression, especially in the arts, take note: Don’t fuck with theatre kids.

 

The University's Lawyer Did WHAT???

Steven Lovett

This one might not interest you a lot, Gentle Reader, but if you’re in, or even care about, higher education, it should.  The Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article last week under the intriguing headline of “A University’s Top Lawyer Is Behind a Bill to Weaken Tenure. The University Had No Idea.”  Yes, really.  (BTW, the article is probably behind a paywall.  Curmie promises not to mislead you about its content.  Or you could check out a number of other sources, including this one.)

It turns out the university in question is a place where Curmie used to work as a part-time rent-a-prof for a year, Emporia State University in Kansas.  Curmie had a decent time there, but that single year was occasioned not merely by the fact that he was able to find a full-time position elsewhere, but by the fact that he couldn’t have stayed on if he’d wanted to.  This wasn’t because the university was dissatisfied with Curmie’s work (he taught more sections in the spring than in the previous fall, so they couldn’t have wanted him gone too badly), but because they were interested in saving a few bucks. 

Curmie forgets the exact details, but it was something like that anyone who taught more than two semesters over a three year period was entitled to benefits; the university therefore had a rotation of three professors to teach the course in question, each for a single academic year at a time.  Curmie got the job because the guy whose turn it was had acquired a full-time job as a bookstore manager and recommended Curmie.  But I couldn’t have kept the job for another year, lest the university would have been forced to treat part-time faculty ethically.

Anyway, let’s fast-forward a couple of decades to the time of COVID shutdowns, which cost colleges and universities, especially non-flagship state schools like Emporia, a lot of money in lost tuition and especially lost room and board income.  That’s when the state Board of Regents decided that state schools could propose plans whereby faculty, even tenured faculty, could be fired without the university’s needing to demonstrate financial exigency.  (N.B., there’s a difference between having a financial motive and financial exigency.)

To be fair, the policy was intended to be temporary, although of course its implementation would be rather more permanent on those affected.  Moreover, the political appointees of the Board neither know nor generally even care anything about education and, unlike, say the sociopath who pretends to think that firing park rangers, air traffic controllers, and USAid workers is going to be a net positive, they might actually have thought they were doing the right thing. 

They weren’t, of course, and almost all of the state’s public colleges and universities declined to participate (although it took the chancellor of Curmie’s PhD alma mater, the University of Kansas, five months to reach that obvious conclusion).  Emporia, though, cheerfully signed on, and fired some thirty tenured and tenure-track faculty. 

To say that the layoffs were handled poorly would be an understatement.  And it’s not just Curmie saying that.  The AAUP’s lengthy report concludes that Emporia’s administration’s actions “constituted a direct assault on tenure and, by extension, academic freedom” and “[demonstrate] that conditions for shared governance at Emporia State University are deficient.” 

More significant, because more potentially binding, the lawsuit filed by eleven tenured faculty dismissed by the university was allowed to go forward by a US District Judge in December. 

Whether because the short-term emergency had passed, because the administration saw the proverbial light, or because of the slap-down in court, Emporia officials now appear to be doing what they can to appear, at least, to support tenure.  Or, at least they were, prior to their lead legal counsel going rogue.

Yes, Emporia State’s chief legal counsel, Steven Lovett, de facto introduced House Bill 2348, which would re-define tenure by declaring that it should not “be defined, awarded, or recognized as an entitlement, right, or property interest in a faculty member’s current, ongoing, or future employment by an institution.”  That “property interest” business is really what this kerfuffle is all about.  Curmie struggles to parse that particular legalese, but this part is pretty clear: that tenure can be “at any time revoked, limited, altered or otherwise modified by the awarding institution or by the state Board of Regents.”

In other words, the bill doesn’t end tenure; it simply renders it meaningless.  The whole idea behind tenure is that faculty who have earned it, which is anything but automatic, should be able to do their research and teaching without administrators looking over their shoulders the whole time.  Academic freedom kicks in completely with tenure, allowing faculty to propose unconventional, perhaps even iconoclastic, ideas.  This benefits both the faculty member and the discipline.  It’s not a bad thing to question conventional wisdom; indeed, it’s the only path to progress.

What people outside academe often don’t understand is that tenure also benefits the institution by making it less likely that good faculty are lured away by another university.  It’s not coincidental that the vast majority of job postings in the academy are for untenured assistant professorships.  Also, of course, the professoriate is well-educated and, generally speaking, intelligent.  Most faculty members could be making more money, often a lot more money, doing something else.  The job security that comes with tenure is a compensating factor, and becomes a way of securing good faculty. 

Also, because the granting of tenure has a higher threshold than simple re-appointment, and because denial of tenure almost always results in a terminal contract, mediocre faculty tend to be weeded out before there’s even a tenure decision.  Obviously, mistakes can be made (in both directions), but in general the process works pretty well, and the existence of tenure is unquestionably a net positive.

For these reasons, the privileges that accompany tenure should be revoked only under extreme circumstances.  Gross misconduct—plagiarism, not meeting classes, sexual impropriety, etc.—would qualify.  So would actual financial exigency: not simply that the university is looking to save money, but that it has no other choice but to cut the position (i.e., not just this particular faculty member).

Back in Curmie’s debating days, one of the mantras was that “the presumption rests with the negative.”  That is, the burden of proof is on whoever wants to change the status quo.  The best-known version of this idea is “innocent until proven guilty”: the prosecution must prove its case; the defense need only poke enough holes in the case to create “reasonable doubt.” 

The same phenomenon applies to tenure.  Applicants must affirmatively prove that they deserve it, not merely that there’s no particular reason to deny it.  But once tenure has been granted, the university must prove that it should be revoked… and it must do so in accordance with both applicable laws and their own guarantees of due process.  That doesn’t mean that such revocation shouldn’t exist, and indeed it does, often but not always with just cause.

Mr. Lovett knows that, or he damned well should.  Thus, that he would seek to undermine the foundations of tenure is odd.  That he would do so in direct contravention of his (only?) client’s wishes is… well, Curmie isn’t a lawyer, much less an authority on legal ethics, but the phrase “grounds for disbarment” comes to mind.

On the one hand, we can appreciate that “the university respects Mr. Lovett’s constitutional rights and freedom of expression.”  That’s a good thing.  On the other hand, it doesn’t take much imagination to contemplate a scenario like this:

Lovett: You wanted to see me?

ESU: Yes, we wanted your advice on a legal strategy.

Lovett: Sure, what’s the case?

ESU: How do we defend the university’s interests against this fucking moron who wants to undermine our ability to attract and retain the best possible faculty?

Lovett: Oh.

This doesn’t look like it’s going to end well.  For anyone.

 

Another Law School Violates Due Process

Scott Gelber

DEI practices are all over the news of late, but this post is about something that happened nearly two years ago.  Well, it started then.  In April of 2023, campus police entered the classroom of tenured law professor Scott Gelber at Ohio Northern University and marched him to a meeting with the law school dean, Charles H. Rose III.  Rose demanded that Gelber resign or retire, or he’d be fired.

Gelber did not comply, and he was escorted off campus, allegedly “to ensure [his] safety, the safety of others, and to protect the instructional integrity of the college of law’s program of instruction.”  (Curmie notes the lack of parallelism in that sentence from a law school dean with wry amusement.)  Gelber was charged with “repeatedly violat[ing] the provisions of the ONU Faculty Handbook and ONU Staff Handbook governing collegiality”; and his conduct supposedly “r[ose] to a level sufficient to support separation.”

Wow, he must have done something really, really, bad to merit de facto arresting him in front of his students and denying him due process, right?  Ah, Gentle Reader, you’re ahead of Curmie once again.  The fact is, we still don’t know exactly what Gelber allegedly did.  What we do know is that he was a vocal opponent of the school’s DEI policy, and that the right-wing press was all over this case when it first broke, with headlines like “Lawsuit describes appalled law professor who witnessed illegal hiring in name of ‘diversity.’”

Law students, as Curmie has noted on several previous occasions are apparently remarkably fragile creatures, and law schools are, ironically, even worse than other kinds of higher ed institutions at upholding the constitutional rights of their faculty.  (See Curmie’s commentaries on four such stories here, here, here, and here.)

OK, a couple of things upfront.  First, Curmie knows nothing about what, specifically, Gelber is alleged to have done.  Perhaps he really did do something egregious.  Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow, but grants the possibility.  But even if the university is “right” on the facts of the case, there’s no excuse for the denial of due process or the unwillingness even to spell out the specifics of the charges. 

Curmie went through a similar situation with less dire potential consequences a couple of decades ago.  The college claimed he’d done something wrong, but wouldn’t say exactly what.  So the opportunity to defend against those charges was significantly curtailed.  Claiming you didn’t do anything problematic is evidence that you think it’s okay to do Big Horrible Thing; wondering if you’re being accused of X is granting that X is a Big Horrible Thing (and that you probably did it).  Curmie believes Joseph Heller created a term for this situation.

“Collegiality,” of course, is a squishy term in the best of times.  Curmie was once accused of uncollegial behavior because he argued against requiring students to participate in a colleague’s pet project (not that the project shouldn’t be available, only that it shouldn’t be required).  And the only way mere uncollegiality ought to prompt a response like what ONU did to Gelber would be if it rose to the level of illegality (a “true threat”), which should be handled by law enforcement, not the university.

It is well within the realm of possibility that Gelber said something that made one or more students “uncomfortable.”  Good!  Students, especially law students, ought to be confronted with ideas that challenge their pre-conceptions and prejudices.  The only way Gelber’s stating his personal beliefs is actually a problem is if he punishes students who disagree with him (or rewards those who agree).  If there’s evidence of that, ONU hasn’t made it public.  Of course, it appears they still haven’t told Gelber or his lawyer… or perhaps they did, privately, after the case had gone to trial.

The university claims Gelber’s opinions on DEI were not the real problem, that Gelber was “intolerant of opposing opinions, disruptive, uncooperative and demeaning of faculty and staff members.”  These protests to the contrary notwithstanding, it appears that Gelber’s outspoken criticism of ONU’s DEI policies, which, as we know, came down from the mountaintop with Moses, was at the center of complaints.  (Again, even if those accusations of intolerance, etc., are true, marching the guy out of his classroom and denying due process is certainly not ethical and probably not legal.)

DEI policies, run correctly, search out qualified people from certain demographics.  They get some small preference, all other things being equal.  (Veterans get even more of an advantage at state schools in Texas.)  Straight white guys still get the job if they’re clearly the best person for the job.  Of course, inevitably, that “all other things being equal” part sometimes fades away, and a demonstrably less qualified candidate is selected.  That, say proponents, is precisely what happened for decades, just in the other direction.  This is where we avoid that issue and remind you, Gentle Reader, that this is more about Gelber’s First Amendment rights and ONU’s procedures, not the legitimacy of their concerns.

Show that Gelber discriminates against the kind of people who might benefit from a DEI initiative, and there’s a case.  Even then, there’s no apparent reason to attempt to embarrass him in front of his students or to not even tell him what he’s supposedly done to precipitate this situation.  FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression), as well as Gerber’s attorney (obviously) tried repeatedly to the ONU to specify what he had done to merit this response.  The university blithely ignored those requests.

Attempting to fire Gelber for expressing his political views (which university officials knew about when they hired him and when they granted him tenure) without presenting literally any actual evidence and without allowing him due process, perpetrates a greater injustice than what they’re accusing him of. 

Anyway, Gelber sued.  It may or may not have been a good idea to hire America First Legal as his representatives.  As you probably guessed from their name, Gentle Reader, they’re primarily interested in right-wing causes.  That offers the advantage that they’d be particularly zealous about Gelber’s cause.  The downside is the temptation to make the case about what he said or did instead of the more compelling argument about the procedures the university followed.

The university tried to obtain a summary judgment to quash the suit.  They were partially successful, knocking out a couple of the counts of Gelber’s suit.  Other parts of the suit were allowed to go forward, however, with the judge declaring that ONU’s “lack of regard for particularity is either naive or a callous disregard for due process.”  But that ruling happened last September.  Why write about it now?

We turn to the headline on FIRE’s follow-up story, published last week: “Ohio Northern sues professor for having the audacity to defend his rights in court.”  Ouch!  Anyway, here’s the key paragraph:

But for defending his rights in state court, ONU sued Gerber in federal court on Jan. 20, claiming Gerber’s “perverted” lawsuit is apparently an “attempt to accomplish . . . personal vendettas” and “unleashing political retribution” against ONU — notwithstanding the state court holding Gerber’s claims warranted proceeding to a jury. ONU’s suit claims Gerber’s “true goal is to manufacture outrage, to influence political retribution, and to extract vengeance against” ONU. According to the lawsuit, Gerber’s attempt to hold the university to its own policies is an unlawful “abuse of process.” 

Oh, bloody hell.  FIRE’s Zach Greenberg calls ONU’s suit a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation), an all too common practice by litigants who don’t have much of a case, but who think they can outlast their opponents because their pockets are deeper.  Curmie is tempted to agree.

About the only thing no one can dispute here is that Scott Gerber is a controversial teacher.  It’s admittedly a small sample size, but the fact that of 13 respondents on the Rate My Professors site, 11 rated him either “awesome” (the highest ranking) or “awful” (the lowest ranking) sort of says it all.  Curmie has literally never seen anything like that inverse bell curve.  It certainly does make one suspect that Gerber’s politics play a role in students’ responses to his courses.

So… where are we?  The chances that Gerber did something that should get him fired: possible.  Chances that Gerber is an asshole: quite likely.  Chances that ONU violated their own policies, denied due process, and damned well ought to be humiliated and forced to cough up major moolah: bordering on ontological certitude.

Checking in with Anatoly Lunacharsky

Anatoly Lunacharsky
(1875-1933)

Curmie often told his theatre history students that Anatoly Lunacharsky had the coolest job title in history: the Kommisssar of Education and Enlightment.  Alas, it accompanied a contender for the worst job in history: the liaison between the leaders of the Communist Party (especially Josef Stalin) and the Russian arts community.

At the beginning of his service, there was actually a period of considerable freedom of expression, and whereas there weren’t a lot of great plays written in Russia after the death of Anton Chekhov, there were certainly some good ones, and thanks to the likes of directors like Konstantin Stanislavky, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Alexandr Tairov, Fyodor Kommissarzhevky, Mikhail Chekhov, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov the Russian theatre was universally regarded as the best in the world.

But then the restrictions came.  Beginning about 1918, Socialist Realism, the idea that aesthetic concerns should be secondary to political ones, gradually became the de facto policy.  (One of Curmie’s mentors in Russian theatre, a woman who was born in what was then called Leningrad, called these “boy meets tractor plays.”)  Chekhov and Kommissarzhevky left the country; Stanislavsky, whose worldwide acclaim made him a little more impervious to governmental threats, did what he could to protect his friends and fellow artists, but his efforts, though significant, were rather like Cú Chulainn fighting the waves. 

Socialist Realism wasn’t the official policy until 1934 (a year after Lunacharsky’s death), but it wasn’t a good idea to be even apolitical after the ascension of Stalin in 1924.  Tairov found that out the hard way, getting into and out of trouble repeatedly, not for being counter-revolutionary, but for not being revolutionary enough.  

Even having been a champion of the cause wasn’t enough to save you.  Just as Leon Trotsky was exiled by Stalin, organizations like Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, once advocates for precisely the kind of censorship Stalin wanted, were also suppressed.  Meyerhold, once the most outspoken Communist of the leading Russian theatre artists, was arrested in 1939 and executed a few months later.

Let me repeat: it wasn’t enough not to do something the powers-that-be didn’t like.  If you didn’t want to end up in Siberia (or worse), you had to be an active supporter of whatever Papa Joe happened to be thinking at a given moment in time.

So why is Curmie writing about all this?  Well, because he thought you might like a brief theatre history lesson, of course.  After all, he has said that he’s not going to write about the Manchurian Cantaloupe and the Muskrats.  If you start thinking about the Russian connection, the purges of career civil servants, that whole business at the Treasury Department, the perfect storm of narcissism and incompetence at the upper levels of government and the sloth and cowardice of the people who could put a stop do this nonsense… well, that’s entirely on you, Gentle Reader.  😉

Is This Fragility, Stupidity, or Just Narcissism?

Regular readers of this blog will know that Curmie is a big fan of finding links, confluences, and coincidences that bring together ideas that wouldn’t normally be associated with each other.  And here we go…

Last week, Curmie was called for jury duty.  He arrived at the courthouse a few minutes before he was scheduled to report, finally found an unlocked door, and joined the 75 or so other folks crowded into the hallway outside the courtroom of District Judge Jefferson Davis (this is Texas, remember, Gentle Reader?).  A few minutes after things were supposed to get underway, the courtroom door opened and we began to file in.

By pure chance, Curmie happened to be rather close to the open door instead of the one on the other side of the courtroom, so he was probably in the first dozen or fifteen propective jurors to enter.  But when he presented his card, the woman scanned down the list and couldn’t find his name.  Had he submitted the online questionnaire?  Yes, nearly three weeks previously. 

So either there was a technical glitch or one side or the other glanced at Curmie’s answers and ran screaming into the night even before the voir dire.  (Curmie rode down the elevator with another man who’d had the same experience, so it wasn’t just him.)  Anyway, Curmie proceeded to return home and take a nap.

The incident did recall, however, the one time Curmie actually served on a jury.  Twentysomething years ago, Curmie was a juror in a criminal case in which the defendant was charged with one count of simple battery and two counts of battery of a police officer.  It was pretty clear that the guy really did beat up his girlfriend, and that he took a swing at the cop who intervened.

That’s where things get a little murkier.  The policemen claimed he’d swung at one, grazed him, and ultimately hit the other, so he was guilty of both counts of battery.  Curmie believed that the guy had tried to hit the older cop, missed altogether, and accidentally hit the younger one.  He was able to convince the other jurors of his point of view.

The younger cop, the one who wasn’t a self-important asshole, was very hesitant on the stand and looked very much like he was more interested in appeasing his partner than in telling the truth.  Curmie remembers saying that he’d rather have the older cop lose his badge than convict the defendant, but that wasn’t an option.  Anyway, we convicted the defendant on two counts and acquitted him on the other. 

The day after Curmie’s jury non-adventure, he read this story from FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression).  Curmie taught for a long time—well over 200 sections of college courses—and often used analogies and imagined scenaria to amplify or clarify a point in a lecture.  To see a law professor punished for doing so certainly aroused Curmie’s interest. 

But there was also the element of “transferred intent,” i.e., a situation in which someone tries to hurt Person X but hurts Person Y instead… precisely the scenario Curmie had been thinking about when remembering that case from a couple of decades ago.  So that raised the story from one to post about on the Facebook page to one to blog about.

The basics of the story are as follows: Kenneth Lawson is a law professor at the University of Hawai’i.  In a lecture about transferred intent, he used a hypothetical example: what if one of the school deans tried to shoot a different dean but shot Lawson himself instead?  This is precisely the kind of thing that happens in damned near every classroom in the country.  The only minor difference is that Lawson showed images of the hypothetical perp and the equally hypothetical intended and actual victims.  (You can see that image on FIRE page linked above.)

Ah, but one (apparently only one) anonymous (of course) student complained, describing the hypothetical as “extremely disturbing.”  Seriously!  This is a law student, mind you: in their twenties, at least, presumably of above average intelligence, and preparing for a career dealing with some stuff that actually is disturbing.

As FIRE’s Graham Piro wrote to the university, “To receive a proper education in the law, students will inevitably encounter difficult topics like sexual assault, homicide, physical assault, domestic violence, and may be faced in school and in their careers with descriptions of personal injuries far more graphic than those in Lawson’s hypothetical.”

The two cases both suggest pretty clearly that you don’t need to have the maturity of a spoiled toddler to get into law school, and that law school deans are apparently a hypersensitive, fragile, and humorless lot.  Naturally, the administration butted in, clumsily, stupidly, and in violation of any norm of academic freedom. (Details in a moment.)

Curmie was reminded of a case he wrote about almost 14 years ago.  The scenario was similar, although in that hypothetical, it was the professor who “shot” the dean.  Here’s a little of what Curmie said at the time:

I confess I have difficulty mustering a considerable amount of sympathy for the fragile little flowers who can’t endure a bit of a challenge to their world-view….

I don’t recall ever using my dean in such a hypothetical situation, but I very well might have. I know that in discussing Aristotle I’ve hypothesized that George W. Bush got hit by a bus (tragedy requires the protagonist be important). But, curiously enough, I never got visited by the Secret Service for that flight of fancy, because it was clear that I was making a very different point than threatening the President.

So what happened in Lawson’s case?  Well, the administrators admitted that Lawson had not violated any policy, but nonetheless demanded that he remove the thought experiment from a posted video of the class — or they would change it for him.  Curmie would be sore tempted to tell some busybody administrator that they could perform and exercise best suited to extremely limber hermaphrodites.  Or perhaps to break out a phrase that has found its way onto a good many t-shirts that get advertised on Curmie’s social media feed: póg mo thóin.

Of course, Lawson refused to do their idiotic bidding, and they did indeed alter his video… but get this, Gentle Reader.  They apparently didn’t care about the violence or the intentionality issues: they just didn’t want to be used in the exercise.  Curmie can’t do better than Piro in describing what happened:

“Remember: these changes were being made because, supposedly, some found a hypothetical of campus figures being shot to be disturbing. So this [the image you see at the top of this post] is what the administration came up with.

You will note that there is still a campus figure on that slide, and it’s the person who was (hypothetically) shot: Professor Lawson. Only the deans have been removed. It seems that at UH, some hypothetical victims are more equal than others.”

Tell it like it is, Graham!  (And nice Orwellian reference, too!)

Oh, and in the letter mentioned above, there’s this: “If the inclusion of the deans is “disturbing and harmful” to students in Lawson’s class, why would the idea of their professor being shot not be equally or more “disturbing”? This glaring double standard leaves room for only one interpretation: that UH’s objection to the slide is not about students’ psychological wellbeing, but rather about enforcing an unwritten and unwarranted prohibition against lese-majeste intended to protect the image or ego of high-ranking administrators.

Damn, Graham!

Piro goes on to suggest that this is more than “just more campus craziness,” and wonders “If administrators can ‘memory hole’ bits and pieces of curricula they don’t like, even when it violates no rule, where does it stop?”  He’s got a point.  Unfortunately, this kind of administrative interference has become so commonplace that it hardly even qualifies as news.  (And if it’s not some moronic dean, it’s an idiot state legislator.  Curmie offers the usual apologies for redundancy.)

Anyway, we’re left with three conclusions, which Curmie lists here in increasing order of confidence.

1.     1. Kenneth Lawson is good at his job.

2.     2. Law school deans need more bran in their diets.

3.     3. Curmie wants to be Graham Piro when he grows up.

 

 

 

 

Free Porn Online... and the First Amendment

Curmie has decided not to write about Donald Trump or Elon Musk (has there ever been a better name for a Bond villain?) except in passing.  He’ll still post articles, memes, and cartoons on his Facebook and Bluesky pages, but he’s going to protect his mental health by not bothering to spend 1000 or 1500 words arguing that this or that action by those two sociopaths is illegal, mendacious, hypocritical, moronic, xenophobic, plutocratic, or intentionally cruel.  It would be newsworthy if either of them ever did anything that didn’t fall into at least a couple of those categories.  So Curmie is going to write about other things.

So, here we go…

Thirty-something years ago, when Curmie was new to the PhD program at the University of Kansas, his mentor, the inimitable Ron Willis, urged him to find something outside the theatre program to keep him from living in the theatre building or the library.  Ron suggested Audio Reader, a service providing access to written material for the visually impaired.

Curmie thought that such a volunteer gig might make sense, and arranged for an audition, which included reading aloud from a variety of sources.  The only specific I remember was that there was an article about the Kansas City Royals; Curmie remembers smiling at the fact that he was enough of a baseball fan to know how to pronounce the name of one of the Royals’ starting pitchers, Mark Gubicza.

Anyway, I got the gig, and began a weekly stint recording a section of the Kansas City Star.  My schedule varied from semester to semester; at one time or another I read from the front page (all stories that started there), nation & world (everything from the news section that didn’t start on the front page), and columns & editorials.  I filled in once or twice on sports when the regular person was ill or out of town.  There were enough volunteers that we had the entire Star, even the classified ads (!), uploaded to the system by 9 a.m. every day.

I’d been at Audio Reader for a few months when I got a call from the volunteer coordinator.  She seemed hesitant, but asked me if I meant it when I said on my audition form that I’d read anything.  I said I did.  So… one of the guys who’d been doing the Adult Magazine Hour had taken a job out of town, so they needed to find someone else to do a monthly hour-long show, reading from Penthouse.  See, someone did care about the articles!

I was pleased to find out that although I was expected to describe all the photographs that accompanied news stories in the Star, I needn’t do that with Penthouse.  Oh, and I should use an alias.   I was also lucky that the other guy reading Penthouse really liked the smuttier stuff, so I could concentrate (mostly) on articles, which really did include the occasional good piece of investigative reporting. 

But the once-a-month thing was based on there being four weekends a month, and sometimes there were five.  There is only so much material that can be coaxed from an issue of Penthouse or Playboy (there were two “women’s magazines” in the rotation, as well).  That meant I got a second show some months.  Audio Reader had subscriptions to the mags we read every month, but the poor volunteer coordinator had to visit the local porno emporium, hold her nose, and purchase… well, something those months.

I used to joke that one does not truly appreciate the literary merit of Penthouse until one has to read aloud for 56-58 minutes from a magazine called (and I’m not making this up) Wet or Butts and Boobs Monthly.

Another year or two later, Curmie gave a conference paper on the press coverage of the Communications Decency Act, which was intended to keep pornographic materials out of the hands of kids.  Despite broad-based and bipartisan support in Congress and from then-President Clinton, the CDA was struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court, who ruled in Reno v. ACLU that it was an unconstitutional abridgement of First Amendment rights.

Of course, in those days the allure of online porn was limited by the available technology.  Most people’s internet access was through dial-up, and it would take a couple of minutes to see a still photograph.  Now, you can access an hour-long video in an instant.  So shutting off hard copies of magazines doesn’t solve the problem of allowing access to minors, many of whom have better technical skills than you or I, Gentle Reader.  Demand has changed significantly. Unsurprisingly, companies like PornHub are now worth well into ten figures, whereas Curmie had to check to see if Penthouse still exists.  (It does.)

So we jump forward a couple of decades from when Curmie moved to Texas and therefore stopped volunteering with Audio Reader (he still sends a little money their way).  Curmie became dimly aware that in June of 2023 Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1181, which required pornsites to “use reasonable age verification methods” to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.”  The law also required websites to “display health warnings about the effects of the consumption of pornography.”

Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, YouPorn and Brazzers, did not comply, and they were sued by Abbott’s minion accused felon Attorney General Ken Paxton.  And then there was a counter-suit, claiming violation of First Amendment rights.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  The Fifth Circuit, which is generally roughly as civil libertarian as the KGB, voted 2-1 to uphold the age identification requirement but to scuttle the health warning.

Aylo appealed to the Supreme Court while blocking access to its sites in Texas.  Instead, users saw a message stating that the company would comply with the law, but arguing:

Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites open and accessible. As we’ve seen in other states, such bills have failed to protect minors, by driving users from those few websites which comply, to the hundreds of thousands of websites with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply.

Curmie, being Curmie, wondered whether this argument holds up, decided to test it.  It took him less than a minute to find a site with apparently thousands of videos, live feeds, “chat rooms,” etc., readily accessible from Chez Curmie in Texas.  And if Curmie can do that, you can bet the ranch that pervy high school sophomore can do so, as well.  It does indeed appear that sites willing to obey the law are being punished relative to those that flout it.  The question of selective (or, at best, random) enforcement is real.

That still doesn’t solve the problem, of course.  Curmie won’t claim to understand the various means of age verification and their relative effectiveness or intrusiveness.  What doesn’t seem to be in question, at least ostensibly, is that some sort of gatekeeping would be a good idea.  So we’re really talking about technical details, not philosophies.  (Curmie does note the distinct possibility that Abbott and his ilk would very much like to shut down access to adults as well as to minors, but of course none of these folks would actually admit that this legislation is intended to be the thin edge of the wedge.)  There’s a good overview of the various to-ings and fro-ings by Marc Novicoff of The Atlantic here.

Anyway, Curmie, not being a devotee of PornHub’s services, confesses he’d pretty much forgotten about the whole business until a couple of weeks ago when Justice Alito made headlines by inquiring, obviously mockingly, if PornHub is “like the old Playboy magazine, you have essays there by the modern day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?” 

A handful of left-leaning sites tried to suggest that the question shows the 74-year-old Alito to be out of touch with reality.  Curmie is no fan of Alito, whom he suspects may well be past his sell-by date, but this question was indeed directly on point, because he knew the answer.  Some of those mags from yesteryear did indeed have things to offer other than photos of attractive young women in various states of undress.  Lawyers for Aylo had to admit that, no, there’s nothing equivalent on their site.

So where does all this leave us?  Well, FIRE, the best-known of the free speech advocacy organizations, has been all over this case since SCOTUS agreed to hear it.  The entire post is worth reading, but here’s a brief sample:

The problem with age-verification laws is they place a burden on every consumer — adults included — to access constitutionally protected speech. And verifying your age online is a different animal from simply flashing a driver’s license to someone behind a counter. It usually means handing over your government ID for a platform or verification service to copy, entering the last four digits of your Social Security number, or even submitting to biometric facial scanning…. 

[The Fifth Circuit decision] ”ignores the district court’s finding that the Texas law is “unreasonably intrusive in its use of age verification” because, according to Texas’ own expert, there were “several ways that age-verification can be less restrictive and costly” than the Texas law requires….

Most recently, in Free Speech Coalition v. Rokita (2024), an Indiana district court… explained that strict scrutiny must apply to the age-verification law because, for example, Indiana’s law (like the Texas law) applies to websites that have 33.4% or more sexual content. In other words, age verification would apply even to “adults attempting to access material perfectly appropriate for minors” and “even when the majority of a website contains entirely acceptable, and constitutionally protected, material....

The hope, of course, is that the Court — unlike the Fifth Circuit — follows its internet speech precedents safeguarding adult free speech rights.

Still, the prediction is that this particular SCOTUS is likely to uphold the Texas law and extend (or at least allow the extension of) similar restrictions elsewhere.  Caught up in the legalese, the technical arguments, and the legitimate and appropriate desire to keep obscene content out of the hands of minors are two simple questions: does the Texas law do what its supporters say it does, and does it do so in the least intrusive manner possible?

The answer to both of these questions is an incontrovertible “no.”  QED.

On the Aftermath of the Budde Homily

Let’s talk about Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s homily last week, or rather the responses to it.  You will recall, Gentle Reader, that she closed her remarks with the following:

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are transgender children in both Republican and Democrat families who fear for their lives.

And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

Have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.

May God grant us all the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and our God, for the good of all the people of this nation and the world.

Curmie has three other essays partially written, and he acknowledges both that he’s late to this particular party and that he could never be as informed or articulate as Hayden Vaughn or Mark Sandlin or Tom Christofferson.  Rex Huppke’s snark is pretty good, too.  Seriously, please read those posts.  All that said, Curmie wants to follow up on a couple of ideas.

First, obviously, is that Bishop Budde owes no one an apology for suggesting that <checks notes> “Blessed are the merciful” (that’s Matthew 5:7, for those of you keeping score at home).  Nor does her Church.  The closest her critics can come to a rational argument is that she shouldn’t have addressed her closing remarks directly to the newly-installed President Trump. 

To this criticism, Curmie offers the following rebuttal: 1). It is her right, indeed her responsibility, to inject an ethical perspective into the proceedings.  Representing the teachings of the faith the new President purports to believe in doesn’t seem out of line. 2). The ceremony was part of the inauguration festivities.  We know that because Trump was in a church.  (Curmie hasn’t attended a regular church service—as opposed to, say, a wedding—in years, either.  But Curmie isn’t a hypocritical billionaire hawking autographed Bibles, either.) 

But let’s move on to the reactions of three people in particular.  The first, of course, is the POTUS himself.  (That’s an acronym for Petulant Obnoxious Toddler of Unusual Size, right?)  You can read his screed in its entirety here, if you must.  By now, though, you probably know the salient points: that she’s a “so-called bishop,” a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” that she was “was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” and “the service was a very boring and uninspiring one.”  Yadda yadda yadda.

Actually, of course, she was simply doing her job, suggesting that the most powerful man in the world (but don’t tell Elon that) might show some mercy.  She didn’t say anything political, strictly speaking, at all.  That Trump would take offense at an indirect suggestion that he might pay at least a little attention to one of the central tenets of the religion of which he purports to be a member tells us all we need to know.

But we expect such brattiness from Trump, so it practically doesn’t register.  And, by now, we probably ought to expect even greater inanity from Representative Mike Collins of Georgia, who is primed to give his fellow Georgia Congresscritter Marjorie Taylor Greene a run for her money if she wants to retain her title of Biggest Idiot in American Politics.  This is the same yahoo who claimed that Joe Biden was behind that “assassination attempt” on Trump that Curmie still isn’t convinced was anything but a poorly directed community theatre production.

Now this blithering buffoon has posted that New Jersey-born Bishop Budde “should be added to the deportation list.”  Collins is, of course, too stupid to realize that in his zeal to protect the Tangerine Tribblehead that he’s undercutting what few philosophical underpinnings there are to the ongoing mass deportations (but notably, not from blue states with the exception of notoriously liberal Austin, Texas).  

If you want to claim that people are are “criminals” if they’re in the country illegally, even if they’ve been taxpayers and community leaders for decades or if they arrived as infants and never knew another country, there’s at least a legalistic argument there.  But Collins has shown very clearly that the intent of the MAGA minions isn’t grounded in the law, but in the attempt to get rid of anyone who isn’t willing to say and do whatever the Fat Felon wants.

And finally we move on to Karoline Leavitt, the new White House Designated Liar Press Secretary, who claimed that Budde had “weaponized the pulpit” (unlike, say, Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell, apparently), that her comments were “egregious,” and that “she should apologize to President Trump for the lies that she told.”  Look, we all understand that whoever is in that job is expected to shill for the boss, and if it takes a little dishonesty to do that, none of us are shocked that we’re fed a line of bull.  This is true of every administration Curmie can remember; Republicans don’t have a monopoly. 

We can also extend to Leavitt at least a modicum of respect for clinging (retroactively) to the legalistic argument outlined above.  Technically, anyone in the country without either citizenship or appropriate other credentials is a “criminal.”  This would include even Dreamer kids, who have done literally nothing “wrong” other than not leaving the only home they have ever known, still as children, and without their parents...  or a passport, for that matter.  (Curmie expresses precisely zero surprise that the DACA policy introduced by the Obama administration has been ruled unlawful by the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which often rules in ways no rational and even marginally empathetic person would do.)

So we can blame a little of Leavitt’s accusation that Budde “lied” on an inelegant phrasing by the latter, but notice that Leavitt objects to Budde’s “lies.”  That’s plural.  Where are the rest?  Are there people in this country right now who are scared?  Hell, yes.  Curmie is a little trepidatious, himself, and he’s a cishet white male American-born citizen.  He does have this awful habit of speaking his mind, however, and that there’s even a remote possibility that he’ll end up in trouble for that is more than a little ominous.

Are there trans kids in both Republican and Democratic households?  Yes; Curmie knows both, personally.  Do “the vast majority” of immigrants, even those without documentation, pay taxes?  Yes.  Are they good neighbors?  Yes.  Do they attend religious services?  At least as much as citizens do.  Are some of them “fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands”?  Yes.  Does the Christian God teach that “that we are to be merciful to the stranger”?  Undeniably.  So… about that plural, Ms. Leavitt…

It is indeed clear that Budde is no fan of Trump.  She wrote in response to Trump’s media stunt standing holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church after having police and National Guard troops clear the area with flash-bang and tear gas munitions, “Mr. Trump used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands.” Tell us what you really think, Bishop!

By contrast, Budde is pretty accurate when she says “It was a pretty mild sermon.  It certainly wasn’t a fire and brimstone sermon. It was as respectful and as universal as I could, with the exception of making someone who has been entrusted with such enormous influence and power to have mercy on those who are most vulnerable.” 

That seems reasonable enough to Curmie.  He’s now officially a fan.

Trump’s Day One and the Constitution

When you say the quiet part out loud.

No, Curmie didn’t watch a moment of the inauguration live, but he does have access to the interwebs, knows how to read, and (with his glasses on) has quite good vision. 

Curmie thinks that virtually everything in Trump’s agenda is stupid, but not necessarily objectively stupid.  Some parts are at least defensible, i.e., their wisdom or lack of it is a matter of opinion.  Withdrawing from the World Health Organization is one such instance.  Others are just showboating, e.g., “officially” re-naming Denali and the Gulf of Mexico.  This is the kind of bullshit that plays well with the faux patriot MAGAs, at least with those that haven’t yet figured out that the incoming plutocracy cares literally nothing about them.

But on to constitutionality…  There is not, and should not be, any requirement that anyone in this country should have to place a hand on a Bible (or any other book… anyone else having a “Fried Green Tomatoes” moment?) to declare an oath.  The fact that Trump didn’t do so is perfectly legal and does not in any way render the oath less binding (as if the Grifter-in-Chief has the slightest interest in upholding any vow).  It does highlight the phoniness of his pseudo-Christianity, but anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knew long ago that he’s less of a Christian than Curmie, who just listed himself as agnostic on a juror information form.

Mr. Trump is also legally free to pardon whomever he likes.  The Constitution grants far too much power to the President in this regard, but one suspects that the founders couldn’t have imagined that the office would ever be held by so reprehensible a figure.  And, to be fair, President Biden’s wholesale pardons and commutations, including pre-emptive pardons for family members, provides a lot of cover for whatever 47 wants to do.

The President can also create new government offices, like the Department of Government Efficiency.  (True, there are at least three lawsuits already filed against DOGE, but Curmie isn’t optimistic about their chances.)  Yes, the department was created for the primary purpose of siphoning money out of Medicare and Social Security and into tax cuts for billionaires.  No, it’s not a coincidence that despite the presumed need to lower expenditures we’re now talking about planting the American flag on Mars.  Guess what head of DOGE stands to make billions from government contracts to provide the capability to accomplish that largely frivolous goal?  Hey, you got it in one, Gentle Reader!  Well done!

Speaking of the only person in the country more dangerous than Donald Trump, how about that Nazi salute!?!  Let’s be real.  That’s what it was; no one does that accidentally, certainly not twice.  It was purely intentional, a gesture of arrogance by an asshole fully aware that there’s nothing we mere mortals can do about it.  His response was, of course, to blame people who said he was acting like a Nazi just because he was acting like a Nazi.  Trump won’t dump him for stuff like this, only possibly down the road for upstaging Dear Leader Himself.  Musk’s defenders can say all they want about a “Roman salute,” but they’re not fooling anyone with an IQ above room temperature. 

But here’s the thing, Gentle Reader.  This column is about the constitutionality of events, not their advisability.  This isn’t Germany, where that gesture would have had Mr. Musk led away in handcuffs.  We, all of us, including amoral mediocrities with literally no public-spiritedness, are protected by the 1^st Amendment.  He’s got a legal right to make that gesture… and we’ve got a legal right (and an ethical responsibility) to recognize it for what it was, and to say so out loud.

Finally, we come to the one absolutely, no doubt about it, unconstitutional moment.  That would be, of course, to deny birthright citizenship.  The 14^th Amendment couldn’t be more explicit: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States….”  Trump wants to quibble about “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”  He has literally no case, despite his claims to the contrary.  This is just another example of the Manchurian Cantaloupe throwing a little red meat to the MAGA crowd by playing on their prejudices… so they won’t notice how quickly and how thoroughly he’s screwing them in other ways.

And, Trump being Trump, he feels compelled to lie about it: “It’s ridiculous, we’re the only country in the world that does this with birthright, as you know, and it’s just absolutely ridiculous.”  The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky notes that some 32 other countries, including Canada, Mexico, and 27 of the 32 nations in the Caribbean, Central and South America, have unrestricted birthright citizenship.  News flash: Trump is a lying buffoon.

Curmie is willing to listen to an argument that the Constitution ought not to say what it clearly says.  Illegal immigration is indeed a problem, and there’s some substance to the whole “anchor baby” argument.  Just as conservatives struggle to find a reason to oppose responsible gun control legislation other than the 2^nd Amendment, liberals have the same problem with birthright citizenship.  But the 14^th is even more explicit than the 2^nd (remember that pesky “well-regulated militia” phrase?), and it is sufficient to prevent any “executive order” from taking precedence.

No, Curmie doesn’t much care for the current makeup of SCOTUS, and he wouldn’t trust a couple of them to admit that night tends to be darker than day if the First Felon said otherwise.  But the majority, even the ones Curmie disagrees with most of the time, are at least smart enough to realize that acceding to this particular Trumpian tantrum would destroy the few feeble strands of respect SCOTUS still retains. 

And that, Gentle Reader, is about the best we can hope for over the next four years.