Emily Brooker's 15 minutes of infamy are surely up by now, but the former Missouri State University student refuses to give up the spotlight.
Brooker testified this week at a hearing in Jefferson City for something called the Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act, a piece of legislation that bastardizes the meaning of "intellectual" and makes a mockery of "diversity."
Brooker, as you probably remember, sued MSU after claiming her "Christian beliefs" were being trampled (she refused to write a letter to state lawmakers, voicing support for gay marriage). The university quickly settled the claim and cleared Brooker's academic record. The head of the social work graduate program stepped down from that post but continues to teach at MSU.
Republican lawmakers pushing the Brooker Act swallowed a load during the hearing. A
News-Leader account of the meeting included this claim from witness Mindy Ellis, an Ozarks social worker:
"(Another professor) made several statements leading several students to believe that a good social worker must engage in a homosexual act at some point."
Where are the "several students," when was the statement made, where's the proof that this is anything more than an outrageous lie?
But that's the way the radical right operates in Missouri and across the nation. Throw out a spectacular claim, rely on the media to report it without skepticism, and then point to the ensuing media frenzy as proof that there's more to the story than smoke. This, by the way, is the only time they like the media -- when it does their bidding. The rest of the time it's the liberal media and you can't trust anything they say.
(The radical right likes to shout a lot about discrimination against Christians, a major point of Brooker's beef. Last we checked, Christians accounted for
85 percent of the U.S. population. That's more than 224 million people, and they much rule the national roost.)
The radical right's other specialty is wordnapping -- stealing perfectly decent words and twisting them into something contrary to truth. Take "intellectual diversity." Under the Brooker Act, it's defined as "the foundation of a learning environment that exposes students to a variety of political, ideological, religious, and other perspectives."
C'mon. Do you really believe they mean it? A "variety" would include perspectives from across a broad spectrum. Brooker and her supporters in the Missouri General Assembly want to squelch perspectives that differ from their point of view. They're pushing for less diversity, not more. That's anything but intellectual.
