Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman refuses to address the fact that a professor under her tenure practices anti-gay hate and uses his position at Princeton University to falsely give credence to his work.

GAY RIGHTS NATIONAL EMERGENCY – AN OPEN LETTER TO PRINCETON PRESIDENT SHIRLEY M. TILGHMAN

 

 

To:

Shirley M. Tilghman, President
Princeton University

smt@princeton.edu 

President Tlighman:

This regards your unconscionable cowardice and/or lack of good character in so far refusing publicly to condemn the malicious nationwide political gay bashing of Princeton University Professor Robert George. I sent you an e-mail in this regard, which you ignored. Separately, I sent an e-mail to Princeton University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua; he also ignored my e-mail. I then called his office; he happened to pick up, acknowledged receipt of my e-mail and said that you would not be commenting.

As a regular contributor to The Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism, I know that one of the most urgently important lessons of the Holocaust is that a society must not wait until the lowest imaginable degradation of ignorance-fueled anti-minority prejudice is reached before taking a stand against such dangerous prejudices.

Though Princeton Professor Robert P. George is not qualified to speak scientifically about the psychology of sexual orientation, he presumes authority to speak on the topic as though he were an expert in it. Many of his published academic papers and articles are actually anti-gay hate literature that have only been published in academic journals and elsewhere because of the ongoing prevalence of ignorance-fueled anti-gay prejudice in the society.

It should nonetheless concern Princeton University when one of its supposed star scholars is publishing junk scholarship with the Princeton University brand name attached. Your institution’s integrity is on the line. By way of example I am going to cite footnote number 10 in Princeton University Professor Robert George’s notorious anti-gay hate essay “What is Marriage?” This scurrilous anti-gay hate literature was co-written by a Princeton Ph.D. candidate, meaning, at Princeton, Professor George is grooming a new generation to perpetuate a corrosive and harmful ignorance-fueled prejudice. Professor George in the aforementioned footnote wrote, “Throughout history, no society’s laws have explicitly forbidden gay marriage. They have not explicitly forbidden it because, until recently, it has not been thought possible.”

The Roman emperors Nero and Elagabalus each were married to men in public ceremonies described by such scribes as Cicero. At a later date, the Theodosian Code (9.7.3) made illegal such same sex relations. Were it not for the Romans one might point at the tradition of berdaches in the cultures of various Native American tribes. If berdaches’ domestic relationships did not correspond precisely to contemporary American marital relationships, neither did Native Americans’ heterosexual marriage-like domestic arrangements.

The cultures of ancient Rome and of the Native Americans hardly exhaust historical examples of same sex relationships being endorsed by societies. While the evidence from ancient Egypt remains incomplete, surviving Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom accounts and other evidence suggest that homosexuality in those periods extended in significance beyond mere physical relations. And, I have not yet mentioned ritualized female pairings among the Nuer of Sudan or ritualized male pairings in the Azande culture.  I trust that you know at least something about historical same-sex relationships in China and Japan.

My main point in this to you is that Princeton University Professor Robert George ignored mountainous scholarship in the field of Cultural Anthropology to allege that ritualized same sex unions had throughout history not existed. He did so in the pages of an academic journal, using his Princeton University associations as credentials, and in order to perpetuate anti-scientific, anti-fact, anti-gay prejudices. Note, please, that Professor George has had professional associations with the anti-gay hate group Focus on the Family, one of whose officials, Tom Minnery was on the floor of the United States Senate during a hearing when under oath called out for falsifying evidence about gay human beings, with intent to see discrimination against them perpetuated in the United States.

While each and every aspect of the very serious injuries Princeton’s Professor Robert George causes to be inflicted on his victims nationwide and beyond is of extreme concern, perhaps no aspect is quite so shocking as Professor George’s complicity in perpetuating nationwide school environments hostile to young LGBT human beings. The website of Professor George’s American Principles Project includes articles that rail against the teaching of humane acceptance values in public schools, with the reason given being that teaching acceptance values are “subterfuges” to promote acceptance of gay human beings. Professor George is publishing this anti-gay hate literature in a social climate where some people of influence state that anti-gay bullying is a “healthy” form of peer pressure. Dr. Rich Swier, who promotes the idea that anti-gay bullying is a “healthy” form of peer pressure, enthusiastically cites Princeton Professor Robert George’s writings on his blog. Here in case you missed the story is a report about the recent anti-gay bullycide of Jamey Rodemeyer.

NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, an organization Professor George started and of which he is Chairman Emeritus, is currently engaging in anti-gay politicking in the very district where Jamey Rodemeyer fell victim to anti-gay bullying. Professor George’s vigorous and sustained activity in this field runs counter to the policies and recommendations issued by every major modern medical and psychological association including the AMA. If you are not familiar with what a student victim of this ignorance suffers, please read my article “Gay Florida Teen, Harassed by Teacher, Tortured by Students, Denied Justice.”

We shall not remain silent while . . . even in the midst of an epidemic of bullycides among gay American teenagers . . .. Princeton University officials continue to enable the monster bigot Professor Robert George.

At this link is the online petition calling for you and other Princeton University Board of Trustee members to repudiate Professor Robert George’s ignorance-fueled anti-gay prejudices. Jamey Rodemeyer couldn’t sign the petition because he is dead. Who knows? Maybe one day he could have attended Princeton.

Shame on you, Princeton University President Tilghman. Shame.

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Editor’s note: President Tilghman and her office have not responded to repeated requests for comment.

 

New York City-​based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-​interest by-​line has appeared on Advocate​.com, PoliticusUSA​.com, The New York Blade, Queerty​.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide” is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.