January 2002
The reaction to ” Silencing Sommers,”
my last piece for NRO, has been overwhelming. This story of Christina Hoff
Sommers, a nationally respected critic of feminist excess, being silenced,
grossly insulted, and effectively ejected from a government conference
at which she had been invited to speak, has been posted and reposted –
with outraged commentary – all over the web. The National Association of
Scholars has issued a statement condemning the treatment of Sommers, and
many people are asking what can be done to redress this wrong. This incident
seems to have crystallized the widespread feeling that both free speech
and academic standards have been sacrificed to multiculturalist and feminist
orthodoxies, not only in academia, but in all of our ruling institutions.
The uproar over the silencing of Christina
Hoff Sommers has been such that Charles G. Curie, the Bush administration’s
newly appointed administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration (SAMHSA) in the Department of Health and Human
Services, has sent a letter to National Review Online formally responding
to the controversy. That letter contains much that deserves praise. Yet
Curie’s response to the Sommers incident raises warning flags as well.
To his great credit, Charles Curie
says that he was appalled to learn what happened to Christina Hoff Sommers,
and forthrightly acknowledges that she was both “censored” and “silenced”
by government officials. Curie also lets it be known that he has personally
apologized to Sommers for the behavior of his agency. For all of this,
Curie deserves praise. It’s a rare day indeed when a victim of “political
correctness,” however egregious, receives a formal public apology and an
admission of guilt. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Curie is a brand-new
Bush appointee, now forced to deal with the misbehavior of the Clinton-appointed
officials who have been running his agency.
But Curie’s letter also raises the
disturbing prospect that those who have perpetrated this outrage will get
away with a mere slap on the wrist, and that the Center for Substance Abuse
Prevention (CSAP), (the division of SAMHSA whose shoddy programs Sommers
was criticizing – and whose managers silenced her), will continue to waste
literally hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on silly, unproven –
and even counterproductive – ideologically driven programs.
December 11,
2001, National Review Online.
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