What’s most striking about Wolfe’s merely semi-satirical portrait of Duke University is how, after 35 years of institutionalized feminism, student sexuality hasn’t evolved into an egalitarian utopia. Instead, it has regressed to something that a caveman would understand—a sexual marketplace where muscles are the measure of the man.

Referencing, of course, Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

At issue are comments Obama made privately at a fundraising gathering in San Francisco last Sunday. He explained his troubles winning over working class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

“It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Clinton counters with a surprisingly conservative retort:

“I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies,” she said. “Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith.

“I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling’ to religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.”

Wow, nice!

So some “booksellers’ union”, seeking to reclaim literacy as the rightful province of the aristocracy, sued Amazon.com for offering free shipping, charging that this practice violated the legal limit on discounts (5% below the publisher’s recommended price), at least with respect to the cheaper-end books. The court agreed, and ordered Amazon.com to stop offering free shipping to the French, or else pay a $1,470-per-day fine.

The “booksellers’ union” praised the decision, saying it would protect the French people from too-low prices. Phew.

What Child is this who, laid to rest
On Mary’s lap is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing;
Haste, haste, to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come peasant, king to own Him;
The King of kings salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.
Raise, raise a song on high,
The virgin sings her lullaby.
Joy, joy, for Christ is born,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

First of all, Mark Steyn points out the difference between a country with a First Amendment and a country with a “Human Rights Commission”.

Second, the city of Philadelphia seems to think that it’s part of that latter category. Geno’s Steaks is one of the two most popular cheesesteak joints in Philadelphia — it’s one of the few remaining cultural institutions of a once-great city. Recently, owner Joe Vento put up a sign reading, “This is AMERICA. WHEN ORDERING, please ‘SPEAK ENGLISH.’”

Well, apparently, that doesn’t fly with the speech police. Philadelphia’s “Commission on Human Relations” held a hearing today to determine whether the sign violates anti-discrimination laws. (Which hearing was called in response to a complaint by the commission’s own chairman, who presided today and apparently is one of three people who will vote on the matter.)

Camille Charles, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, testified that the sign reminds her of the Jim Crow era. “The signs give a feeling of being unwelcome and being excluded,” she said.

Well, yes, that seems to be the point: only serve customers who order in English. How can you do anything else? What’s happening here, of course, is that liberals disagree with the political statement implied by the sign–that people in America ought to speak English–and therefore they want the government to silence that statement.

Nick Taliaferro, of the Human Relations Commission, told a reporter, “Individuals who operate in a place of public accomodation cannot post signage or express messages that might have the resulting effect of making any group, any ethnicity, any national origin person, feel unwelcome.”

Really! No messages that might make any group feel unwelcome? The commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy blog make some good points:

• “Does the requirement mean a business has to hire bilingual employees based on the possibility that someone might come in and order in a foreign language?”
• “When I call my bank the menu says “push 1 for English or push 2 for Spanish”. My bank doesn’t offer choices for any other languages and I don’t see that as any different than Geno’s Steaks electing to use only English.”
• “What if the sign read, ‘Due do our unfortunate linguistic shortcomings, we can speak only English. Accordingly, we can only serve English-speaking clients. Interpreters welcome.’”
• “Seems like this law would also include the posting of high menu prices that would make poor people feel unwelcome.”
• “I would think that people who don’t speak English can’t read the sign and thus couldn’t be offended. “
• “Who cares? Am I the only cold-hearted capitalist who thinks that if non-English speakers are deterred from going to a hostile restaurant, they will go elsewhere, and, eventually, the restaurants that are more inclusive will do better for the exclusiveness of places like Gino’s? What does this come down to? ‘You’re not allowed to lose business by being a xenophobe’?”
• “Taliaferro’s overbroad statement could theoretically include groups like known fugitives. But I don’t think he was quoting the statute. The statute, on the other hand, could well encompass groups like diabetics, anorexics, or alcoholics, which leads to all kinds of fun conclusions. Does the prohibition on using marital status apply to singles bars and dating services? Fascinating.”
• “A sign outside of a porno shop that said ‘Adults Only’ might make children feel unwelcome.”
• “My fond hope is that Geno’s lawyer will address the Commission in, say, Urdu. And only in Urdu.”

Ah, you can only laugh at our ridiculous nanny statism. I don’t have anything to add, except the following book recommendations:

• Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government, by P.J. O’Rourke
• You Can’t Say That!: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Anti-Discrimination Laws, by David Bernstein

Here’s a lady who got a bit out of her depth in the Muslim world. Fifty-four year-old Englishwoman Gillian Gibbons was teaching in an elementary school in Khartoum, capital of the Sudan, which has an Islamic government. Ms. Gibbons brought a stuffed teddy bear into her class of seven-year-olds for them to have as a class mascot. What should they call the teddy bear, she asked them? “Mohammad,” the kids said, this being the only name they know. All right, said Ms. Gibbons, we’ll call it Mohammad. Uh-oh. I guess she forgot to add, “Peace be upon him,” because calling that teddy bear Mohammad has gotten Ms. Gibbons 15 days in the slammer, to be followed by deportation. You’d think the Brits would be wise to how things work in the Sudan, after what happened to General Gordon back in 1885, but no, apparently they never learn. Or, more likely, in the sensitive, PC-whipped Britain of today, they just don’t teach them about General Gordon, because he was a wicked, colonialist, capitalist, heterosexist exploiter of the suffering Sudanese people, although some people will give you an argument about “heterosexist”, but we’ll let that pass.

Modern multicultural Britain showed its true colors in the person of Ms. Gibbons’ son, John, a 25-year-old marketing consultant. This young man went into full multicultural cringe, sniveling to the BBC that, “I don’t want the verdict to lead to any anti feeling towards Muslims. One of my fears, and I imagine my mother’s also, will be that this results in any sort of resentment towards Muslim people.” No, that would never do, would it, John? They lock up your mum in a filthy, rat-infested dungeon, for what was obviously an honest mistake, and your biggest fear is that someone will feel resentment towards them. You know my biggest fear, John? My biggest fear is that there are enough whimpering pultroons like yourself in the Western world to turn our civilization to mush — the way political correctness has turned your brain to mush.

While Ms. Gibbons’ son was begging the Muslims to give his mum a good thrashing–and to give him one, too, please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble–one of his fellow Brits announced that she had had her tubes tied to save the world. Ms. Toni Vernelli, of Somerset, England, had herself sterilized at age 27 to reduce her “carbon footprint”. …

Since then, Sudanese Muslims have–surprise!–taken to the streets, calling for Ms. Gibbons’ death:

Thousands of angry Sudanese, some brandishing swords, marched Friday through the centre of Khartoum calling for the execution of a British woman teacher as she began a brief jail term for insulting Islam.

“Those who insult the Prophet of Islam should be punished with bullets,” a sea of white-clad demonstrators shouted after Gillian Gibbons, 54, was jailed for 15 days on charges stemming from naming a teddy bear Mohammed.

Others chanted “Execute her!” as Sudanese security forces deployed around the British embassy and the ambassador’s residence and the demonstration, called by religious leaders during Friday prayers, spread. 

Now safe at home, Ms. Gibbons hopes there aren’t any hard feelings:

A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad as part of a writing project arrived home Tuesday after being pardoned and said she was “very upset to think that I might have caused offense to people.” …

“It has been an ordeal but I’d like want you to know that I was well-treated in prison and everybody was very kind to me,” she said [noting that the Interior Minister was nice enough to send her a bed]. “I was very sorry to leave Sudan. I had a fabulous time there. It’s a really lovely place, and I managed to see some of the beautiful countryside while I was there.”

Gibbons said she didn’t want her experience “to put anyone off going to Sudan in fact I know of a lovely school that needs a new Year Two teacher.”

Gee, I can’t imagine why this incident would discourage anyone from travelling to Sudan.

One of the facts that we observe with our interior senses is that we all have a thing called conscience. We all make moral judgments. We all judge not merely that a thing is, but that a thing ought to be or ought not to be. That’s simply a fact. Well, either moral judgments can be true or false, or they can’t. Either moral judgments are simply expressions of feelings that we mistake for judgments, or they are what they seem to be. In other words, either there really is good and evil, or it’s all an illusion. Almost nobody lives out the philosophy that it’s all an illusion, that it’s all a fantasy and a fairy tale. They may say it, they may write books about it, but when you treat them according to their own philosophy, it turns out that they don’t really believe it. All right. If there is such a thing as good and evil, explain it: why? If there is such a thing as moral obligation — if you are really obligated to do good and not evil — why? What is there behind the moral law? You see, there are facts about how things and people behave, and there are also moral facts, if this analysis is correct, about about how people ought to behave, but often don’t. What’s behind these moral facts, which we often call a moral law? Musn’t there be a will behind a moral law? We feel as if we’re being commanded, but we don’t see anybody commanding us. [...]

Where did conscience get its authority from? Where did conscience come from? Is it just one of these results of mindless evolution? The brain just happens to be wired that way? Why bow down in sheepish obedience to the accidental fact that this is how your brain happened to be wired? Why not wire it better? Or if it’s just the voice of society, as Freud thinks — if conscience is just the Superego unconsciously mirroring what other people want you to do — why bow down to them as if they’re God? And if it’s just the training your parents gave you, well, your parents aren’t infallible. But everybody, everybody — even the moral subjectivist — thinks that we ought to treat conscience as if it were God’s prophet. But if it isn’t, why should you? It can’t be God’s prophet unless there’s a God. Dostoevsky’s version of the argument is extremely simple: if God does not exist, then everything is permissible.

When I cover Nietzsche in my classes at Boston College, I try to get across his very radical challenge to my students. And one of them is, why is there truth? Why bother with truth? `Why truth, why not, rather, the lie?’ he says. And they can’t answer that. But there’s another one, about morality. Why be good, why not be evil? Why not go beyond good and evil? If there is no God, why not be evil? And nobody has ever answered that question. It’s an astonishingly simple question. Why not be bad? “Well, because we’ll catch you.” No you won’t, I’m cleverer than you are. “Well, we’ll hate you.” So what? I hate you too. I don’t care if you hate me. “Oh, because it’s not conducive to the good of society.” I know. I don’t give a damn about society. Why should I? The thoroughgoing immoralist — it’s very difficult to refute him, if there’s no God.

This is a blockbuster story that is being, unsurprisingly, underreported. Notice these sentences in particular (emphasis added):

The seven-month investigation found 2,570 educators whose teaching credentials were revoked, denied, surrendered or sanctioned from 2001 through 2005 following allegations of sexual misconduct. [...]

The findings draw obvious comparisons to sex abuse scandals in other institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church. A review by America’s Catholic bishops found that about 4,400 of 110,000 priests were accused of molesting minors from 1950 through 2002.

So: in the years between 1950 and 2002, about 4,400 Catholic clergy were accused of sexual abuse. Now, in less than one tenth the time, over half that many public school teachers were punished for sexual abuse — the number merely accused being, presumably, larger. The “obvious comparisons” invited by the AP study are breathtakingly, scandalously unfavorable to teachers. I wonder if, given the muckraking sensationalism of the months-long clergy abuse scandal, we are in for a proportional spotlight on the nation’s public school system.

Somehow I doubt it.

Now when will the media apologize?