The Ohio Senate Republican caucus put on their well-worn thinking caps and passed legislation that would directly address the pointed and legitimate economic concerns of Ohioans.
Just kidding—they didn’t. They prohibited thinking. Perhaps it is not surprising that these officials no longer enjoy doing that exercise.
For a party whose beliefs are so strong that censorship and indoctrination dominate our political environment, they have no objections to using the state’s weapons to do exactly what they oppose.
Senate Bill 1 is a disaster
Its thinly veiled efforts to promote political neutrality and “intellectual diversity” in public universities are nothing more than a ruse to advance their own political agenda and silence discussions that they find unsettling.
The provisions range from eliminating all “woke” activities such as DEI training and scholarships to prohibiting faculty from striking and establishing new ground rules for political discussion in class.
All public universities will be required to offer a government-approved course on the “American economic system and capitalism.”
The bill states that educational institutions must allow students to “reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.”
This is supplemented by requiring a formalized complaint process, in which faculty can be reviewed, punished, or dismissed for failing to follow the law’s intentionally contradictory and ambiguous edicts.
The ACLU, Senate Democrats, and academics and activists far more eminent than myself have laid out their cases line by line in columns that are worth researching and reading. I can’t make an argument that hasn’t already been made to try to derail this dumpster fire of a proposal.
Ohio Republicans are playing silly games
Rather, my response to Sen. Jerry Cirino and his colleagues’ 76-page list of baseless grievances is simple: make us.
Lawmakers who want to play silly games should get silly prizes.
If this state intends to silence the voices of its faculty and students by conducting thought patrol in the classroom, I will be ten times more liberal, loud, and annoying at the risk of being prosecuted.
I’ll eat and breathe DEI and woke. I’ll wear Malcolm X shirts and labor union hats to class. I will caricature everything you fear out of glee that it does not comply with the nanny’s orders.
Ideas are only banned because they endanger someone, and corporate power brokers and politicians despise it when people become educated enough to oppose them.
Rather than allowing the government to bully people into submission, it is time for students, faculty, and universities to stand firm on principle.
Continue teaching about race, gender, and religion.
We can have nuanced discussions about the issues that affect them, but we must not pretend they no longer exist. Ensure that the state’s preference for the free market is consistent with courses that criticize it.
Reading Marx does not make you a Marxist; it makes you a free thinker capable of confronting difficult concepts. Do not restructure your voice, curriculum, or dialogue in response to a vaguely worded authoritarian statute; rather, fight it.
Allow complaints to be filed and heard in universities and courts. We’ll either call the state’s bluff or initiate a mass exodus of experienced and aspiring intellectuals to more deserving shores. They can only harm themselves.
As St. Thomas Aquinas once stated, “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Let us not justify idiocy. We cannot compromise our pursuit of knowledge because a few politicians are concerned about what will happen if we succeed.
